On 3 maj 2007, at 17.53, Duncan Coutts wrote:
This is not a Cabal bug. By design, Cabal does not just pick up any packages from the environment like --make does. One of the main points of Cabal is to be able to explicitly track dependencies of a package, so we do require that they all be listed explicitly. Cabal then tells ghc to *only* look in those listed packages and ignore all others even if they happen to be installed.
Now certainly it would be nicer if ghc+cabal could be more helpful and tell you all the missing packages that you need to list in the "build-depends" field in the .cabal file, rather than currently where you have to do it one by one.
In fact I was thinking of something more than this. When I said "file a bug" I didn't intend to describe it as a bug but as a feature, which are also managed by the bug tracker. Also, I agree that dependencies should be listed explicitly; it might be very useful to let Cabal generate you a template with some sane suggestions, though. / Thomas