On Thu, 2008-10-09 at 11:55 -0700, Duncan Coutts wrote:
All,
I'm trying to do a Cabal-1.6 release, in time for ghc-6.10.
Here's an interim update.
There are 7 packages on hackage where the latest version has a Setup.hs script that works with Cabal-1.4 but does not compile with Cabal-1.6.
Actually it's 8. For some reason I missed lhs2tex. Cabal-1.4 had several compat hacks added to enable lhs2tex to be made to work. Those hacks are gone in Cabal-1.6.
That's actually not too bad. It's been a lot worse in the past, and we have many more packages now.
Further details. I tried to build 685 packages from hackage with ghc-6.8 using Cabal-1.4.0.2 and Cabal-1.6.0.0. Here are the numbers: * Cabal-1.4.0.2: 547 built ok * Cabal-1.6.0.0: 541 built ok So there are (at least) 6 packages that worked with Cabal-1.4.0.2 and now fail with Cabal-1.6. I say "at least" because some failed for me with Cabal-1.4 but only because I'm missing C libs. I don't have an accurate count of that subset. But I don't think it's that large. If we assume it's about 12 newly failing packages then that's under 2%. If I remember correctly we had 8-10% breakage due to Cabal from the 1.1.6 to 1.2 transition with ghc-6.6 to 6.8. So it's rather better this time. This set of course overlaps with the 8 for which the Setup.hs fails to compile. The reason it's not simply an addition to the earlier 7 is because some of those failed to configure with Cabal-1.4 even though the Setup.hs compiled. In a couple cases that was due to C libs. So here's a breakdown of the 6 that are new failures and a couple that definitely fail with Cabal-1.6 and probably would have worked with Cabal-1.4 if I'd had the C libs installed. Failed due to Setup.hs not compiling: * ForSyDe-3.0 * MissingPy-0.10.0 * Takusen-0.8.3 * alex-2.2 * happy-1.17 * lhs2tex-1.13 These two also have Setup.hs scripts that no longer compile * hsql-odbc-1.7 * HDBC-postgresql-1.1.4.0 hsql-odbc never built anyway because hsql does not compile with ghc-6.8. HDBC-postgresql probably would have built for me with Cabal-1.4 if I'd had the postegresql C libs installed. So it's part of the "at least" category which failed with 1.4 only because I didn't have the C libs. Other failures: * HsPerl5 HsPerl5 fails with: Reading parameters from ./HsPerl5.buildinfo setup: HsPerl5.buildinfo:4: Parse of field 'ld-options' failed. The problem here is parsing "-Wl,-E". It is a Cabal parsing bug. It worked in old versions of Cabal but only because they incorrectly interpreted "," as a separator. By luck this worked. Apparently passing -Wl -E to gcc rather than -Wl,-E was not enough to cause visible breakage. The current cabal parser for ld-options only looks for spaces as separators but currently does not allow ',' inside tokens. I'll fix this before the release. Duncan