Re: Agreeing on a UI for sandboxes

Hi, On Sat, Sep 1, 2012 at 3:11 AM, Mikhail Glushenkov wrote:

On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 11:43 PM, Johan Tibell wrote:

...

Why does `cabal install` affect the saved configure flags? Does it do that today even if you don't use the new sandbox stuff?

It doesn't have to affect the package environment file, but otherwise you'll need to specify the configure flags twice:

$ cabal sandbox-init $ cabal install --only-dependencies -w /path/to/compiler $ cabal configure -w /path/to/compiler # Fails without -w

I see. This is no worse (or better) than the current situation today. I think the real solution here is to get rid of a separate "install the obviously needed dependencies"-step. Since I think we need to discuss such a change more in depth, I suggest we just leave the sandboxes having to repeat the -w flag twice, just like non-sandboxes already have to. In general lets just have sandboxes behave exactly as non-sandbox builds, with the exception of the separate package DB and rebuilding add-source deps, for now. This will get something useful into users' hands quicker.

...

That's fine I think. It's like you added a dependency of the main library. The user will need to install that dependency by running

cabal install --only-dependencies

There's a question whether he/she would have to run that in the dir of the dependency or the dir of the main lib.

The simple implementation is to make 'cabal build' imply 'cabal install' for all add-source dependencies. This will download and install all newly-added dependencies.

Andres might protest that this again would imply installing stuff from the Internet. Lets have it instead imply `configure && cabal build` and registering in the sandbox package DB for now. We'll revisit automatic installation later. -- Johan