Andrea: On 08/04/2008, at 10:01 PM, Andrea Vezzosi wrote:

You can almost get that with cabal configurations and the field Buildable: [...] Flag devel Default: False [...] Executable foo if flag(devel) Buildable: False [...]

With that if you pass --flags="devel" to configure the executable foo won't be built.

Thanks for the advice. Coincidentally I started down that path yesterday, and it somewhat works. I have a problem with package dependencies now. I've attached the .cabal file and build -v output below. In brief: I want to build a bunch of binaries that depend more-or-less on the same packages. 'configure' goes through fine, but then Cabal does not include the packages in the 'build' step. Clearly I have to state the dependencies another way, but is there one that avoids a lot of repetition? cheers peter name: site version: 0.1 license: BSD3 license-file: ../LICENSE author: peteg42 at gmail dot com homepage: http://peteg.org/ category: Text synopsis: A Hope site description: Build binaries for a Hope site. build-type: Simple cabal-version: >= 1.2 build-depends: base, cgi, haskell98, hsql-postgresql, hope, mtl, utf8-string Flag FastCGI description: Build a Fast CGI binary. default: False Flag Import description: Build the import binaries. default: False Executable hope.cgi if flag(FastCGI) buildable: False GHC-Options: -Wall Hs-Source-Dirs: . c-sources: ghc_rts_opts.c Main-Is: Hope/CGI.hs Executable hope.fcgi if !flag(FastCGI) buildable: False else build-depends: fastcgi GHC-Options: -Wall Hs-Source-Dirs: . c-sources: ghc_rts_opts.c Main-Is: Hope/FastCGI.hs Executable elibrary if !flag(Import) buildable: False build-depends: hope-elibrary GHC-Options: -Wall Hs-Source-Dirs: . Main-Is: Import/ELibrary.hs Executable news if !flag(Import) buildable: False GHC-Options: -Wall Hs-Source-Dirs: . Main-Is: Import/News.hs Executable user if !flag(Import) buildable: False GHC-Options: -Wall Hs-Source-Dirs: . Main-Is: Import/User.hs $ runghc Setup d -v Creating dist/build (and its parents) Creating dist/build/autogen (and its parents) Preprocessing executables for site-0.1... Building site-0.1... Building executable: hope.cgi... Creating dist/build/hope.cgi (and its parents) Creating dist/build/hope.cgi/hope.cgi-tmp (and its parents) Building C Sources. Creating dist/build/hope.cgi/hope.cgi-tmp (and its parents) /usr/bin/ghc -package hope-elibrary-0.1 -optc-O2 -odir dist/build/ hope.cgi/hope.cgi-tmp -c ghc_rts_opts.c /usr/bin/ghc -o dist/build/hope.cgi/hope.cgi --make -hide-all-packages -i -idist/build/autogen -idist/build/hope.cgi/hope.cgi-tmp -i. -Idist/ build/hope.cgi/hope.cgi-tmp -odir dist/build/hope.cgi/hope.cgi-tmp - hidir dist/build/hope.cgi/hope.cgi-tmp -package hope-elibrary-0.1 -O - Wall dist/build/hope.cgi/hope.cgi-tmp/ghc_rts_opts.o ./Hope/CGI.hs ./Hope/CGI.hs:8:7: Could not find module `Network.CGI': it is a member of package cgi-3001.1.5.1, which is hidden