On Tue, 2009-02-24 at 14:24 +0000, Neil Mitchell wrote:
Hi,
Cabal documents itself as having a --builddir command to change the placement of dist stuff, which is fantastic.
However, running with GHC 6.8.3, Cabal 1.6.0.2, I get:
cabal build --builddir=../../../_make/Tools/ext/haddock-0.9/dist setup.exe: Unrecognised flags: --builddir=../../../_make/Tools/ext/haddock-0.9/dist
i.e. cabal accepts the --builddir command, but the setup that cabal builds doesn't. Why?
Hmm. Does your ghc-6.8 have Cabal-1.6.0.2 registered? If you built Cabal-1.6.0.2 and cabal-install with ghc-6.10 but not also for 6.8 then cabal-install will be forced to pick an older Cabal lib when compiling Setup scripts for 6.8. You can check what it is doing. Clean and run with -v3 and near the top you should see something like: Using external setup method with build-type Simple Creating ./mydist/setup (and its parents) Using Cabal library version 1.2.3.0 Using ./mydist/setup/setup.hs as setup script. Setup script is out of date, compiling... ("/usr/local/bin/ghc-6.8.2",["-v","--make", ... etc So if it's forced to pick an older Cabal lib version then the Setup will not grok --builddir. Really of course we should notice this earlier and complain that we cannot use this new feature while using the older lib version. We should file a ticket about that. In fact the whole issue with what the Setup command line must accept is a tricky issue when it comes to working with custom build systems. Duncan