* Mikhail Glushenkov
Also, is there a way to write a program that would be equivalent to "cabal configure && cabal build" without relying on cabal-install or ghc being installed, just by using the Cabal library? I realise that it would only work for build-type: Simple, but it might be still useful.
'cabal build' is equivalent to 'runhaskell Setup.hs build' 'cabal configure' is mostly equivalent to 'runhaskell Setup.hs configure --user', but uses preferences from ~/.cabal/config. So I think that you can just ship a compiled Setup.hs with your analyser
Thanks — this makes sense.
but you will have to trick 'configure' into thinking that you have all dependencies for the packages that you're compiling installed (basically you'll have to provide a fake 'ghc-pkg' that supports the 'dump' command - with ghc installed, you can just invoke the real ghc-pkg).
That's not a problem, I have to maintain my own package database anyway.
I tried this, and one problem I ran into is that Cabal invokes the linker on the files that it expects my tool to produce. 'ld' fails, and the build aborts.
So you're building a library. Looking at buildLib in Distribution.Simple.GHC I don't see a way to stop the build before the linking phase. But your tool should have already processed all the source files at this stage. Maybe you can produce some dud .o files to placate ld or just print a message that says something like "Analysis complete. Don't worry about the link failure."?
Sorry, I forgot to mention — that actually happens during the configure phase! My command looks like this: runghc Setup -v3 configure --ghc --with-compiler=gen-iface --with-hc-pkg=gen-iface ... and the relevant output from Cabal is searching for ld in path. found ld at /usr/bin/ld ("/home/feuerbach/bin/gen-iface",["-c","/tmp/17368.c","-o","/tmp/17368.o"]) ("/usr/bin/ld",["-x","-r","/tmp/17368.o","-o","/tmp/17369.o"]) /usr/bin/ld returned ExitFailure 1 with error message: /tmp/17368.o: file not recognized: File truncated Setup: /tmp/17369.o: does not exist I guess I can fake it by invoking gcc on '-c', but at this stage it becomes too dirty for my taste. Roman