On Mon, 2008-03-10 at 08:23 +0000, Neil Mitchell wrote:
Hi
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.
That sounds easiest, and should give all the cabal-install benefits to Windows users.
Not quite all. If a package specifies not build type or uses Custom then we have to compile the Setup.hs using the installed Cabal lib. In theory cabal-install can build it against an older version of the Cabal lib, in practise it's not been tested much.
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.
Unless the API 100% stable, I'd be wary of supporting a not quite finished release on Cabal in something as major as GHC.
If it was a 1.4 release then it would have to be stable. We do follow the package versioning policy.
Upgrading Cabal is fairly easy, if people want to do it themselves.
We can make it just as easy to install cabal-install even if it didn't come with this version of GHC.
If Cabal supported darcs links, you could even imagine upgrading cabal with "cabal install cabal --from-darcs" - that would be wonderful!
It's an often requested feature, see ticket #58. Of course cabal-install can install releases on hackage of Cabal and itself. Duncan