#208: Support program prefixes and suffixes ----------------------------+----------------------------------------------- Reporter: duncan | Owner: Type: enhancement | Status: new Priority: normal | Milestone: Component: Cabal library | Version: 1.2.3.0 Severity: normal | Keywords: Difficulty: normal | Ghcversion: 6.8.2 Platform: Linux | ----------------------------+----------------------------------------------- GNU autoconf has these configure flags: {{{ `--program-prefix=prefix' Specifies a prefix which should be added to the name of a program when installing it. For example, using `--program-prefix=g' when configuring a program normally named `tar' will cause the installed program to be named `gtar' instead. `--program-suffix=suffix' Specifies a suffix which should be appended to the name of a program when installing it. }}} This would be handy for appending program versions to allow installing multiple versions of the same program. For example: {{{ cabal configure --program-prefix='$version' }}} So I can end up with `haddock-0.9` and `haddock-2.0.0.0` in my `~/bin` dir. Distros that use 'alternatives' systems might like to use this feature. This should be fairly easy to implement, as the prefix/suffix can be parsed and represented as a `PathTemplate`, which handles `$version` vars etc. The prefix/suffix would need to be propagated into the `LocalBuildInfo` (and probably var-substituted into an ordinary `String` at that point) and then used when generating the binary name. This would be particularly handy in combination with a cabal-install feature to symlink newly-installed versions of programs into an alternative directory. For example we might install versioned binaries into ~/.cabal/bin by default and symlink the latest into ~/bin. Or we might symlink versioned links to each version, and an unversioned link to the latest one that got installed. Anyway, there's room for exploration there as to the best default. -- Ticket URL: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ticket/208 Hackage http://haskell.org/cabal/ Hackage: Cabal and related projects