On Thu, 2007-12-27 at 21:30 -0800, Bryan O'Sullivan wrote:

I'm writing bindings for LLVM at the moment, and I'm using autoconf to ensure that LLVM is really installed, and that the necessary version is present.

Unfortunately, I can't find any pre-existing examples of how to pass arguments from Setup configure through to configure. This is something I need so that I can build against an SVN build of LLVM, instead of installing it to /usr/local where it would indeed get found.

What I'd like to be able to do is augment the arguments accepted by Setup configure to include e.g. --with-llvm=/PREFIX and then pass that through to ./configure. After reading the Cabal source for a while, I eventually noticed --configure-option, but I was hoping to do something a little more integrated, along the lines of adding a --with-llvm option. Is this realistic? The code doesn't currently seem to be set up to permit that kind of extensibility.

There is a way to add extra options via Setup.hs. The parseConfigureArgs takes extra custom flags. However I'm not sure sure it's a very good idea since it's nearly impossible for cabal-install to support those options, since it has to parse its command line before calling Setup.hs. That said, we do need a better method than --configure-option= since we don't expect people to have to use autoconf to be able to customise stuff. Duncan