On Thu, 2007-08-16 at 17:17 +0100, Malcolm Wallace wrote:

As a newbie to the cabal-devel list, I don't know whether this question has already been thought about much, and perhaps even has a really good answer.

I notice that the Cabal darcs repo now has a Cabal.cabal file that uses configurations. Presumably this is self-bootstrapping. But is it still possible to upgrade an older version of Cabal (e.g. supplied with ghc-6.2) to the latest version, using only the older version of Cabal itself?

We've never supported building with an older version of cabal, but fortunately that's never necessary since it can always self-bootstrap: ghc -i. --make Setup.lhs -o setup No makefiles or scripts required. I thought previously that the -i. was not necessary as ghc should look at the local files in preference to any existing registered Cabal package but although it compiles the local files it seems to still link to the existing package. Or something else similarly weird. In fact I've no idea what's going on there just that it works with -i. and it doesn't always without. Duncan