On Sun, 2008-03-09 at 23:32 +0000, Neil Mitchell wrote:
Hi
First, we intend to release the next version of GHC from the current stable branch, 6.8.3, around the end of May 2008. This will probably be the last release from this branch.
Is it possible to include the cabal-install tool with this release, in the Windows installer?
The cabal-install tool provides very useful functionality, and is currently rather tricky to install. If cabal-install was already installed, then installing cabal-install would be trivial (note how cabal-install causes a mental black hole).
Note that cabal-install requires the yet-unreleased Cabal-1.4.x and that GHC-6.8.3 will come with a release from the Cabal-1.2.x branch to preserve API compatibility with the earlier GHC-6.8.x releases. You could still have a cabal-install binary in the Windows installer and not include the Cabal-1.4.x library that you built it against. Alternatively it'd be possible to include Cabal-1.4.x too and have it not exposed by default. That'd enable cabal-install to use it for any packages that use a custom Setup.hs without it being picked up by default by ghc --make or ghci. cabal-install will become easier to install anyway once we make an official release of it and Cabal-1.4. If that's still too tricky for people we could make a single tarball that bundles Cabal-1.4, zlib, HTTP and cabal-install but installs only the cabal-install binary. Duncan