#832: Cabal aggregates dependencies for executables ----------------------------+----------------------------------------------- Reporter: juhp | Owner: Type: defect | Status: new Priority: normal | Milestone: Component: Cabal library | Version: 1.10.1.0 Severity: normal | Keywords: Difficulty: unknown | Ghcversion: Platform: | ----------------------------+----------------------------------------------- I discovered over the weekend while trying to subpackage bluetile, that Cabal seems to aggregate dependencies of executables. For example http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/bluetile/0.5.3/bluetile.cabal generates several executables. Some depend on gtk, others not, and yet Cabal passes "--package-id gtk-..." to "ghc --make" for all of them and as a result the bluetile program (which doesn't depend on gtk) gets linked against gtk (and glade), leading to executable/dependency bloat. Only the executables that are listed with explicit build-depends on gtk should be linked against the gtk package, etc. I will try to dig into the source later and maybe even cook up a patch if I can: a code pointer would be appreciated. I assume Cabal is currently just accumulating all the build-depends which is sub-optimal. (Arguably ghc shouldn't link unused libraries to executables either, though I think that is pretty standard compiler behaviour. But I can file a bug against ghc too if appropriate.) -- Ticket URL: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ticket/832 Hackage http://haskell.org/cabal/ Hackage: Cabal and related projects