Re: [Haskell-cafe] cabal, Setup.lhs example

On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 11:52, Ross Paterson wrote:

On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 11:31:21AM +0100, Magnus Therning wrote:

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On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 10:59, Ross Paterson wrote:

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Magnus is building by directly running the Setup.hs himself, which ignores the Build-Type.  To get cabal-install to use his Setup.hs, the Build-Type must be set to Custom.

Oh, why*2?

Why is the header there if it's not used by Cabal, and why does cabal care?

The field allows cabal to avoid compiling the Setup.hs in this case. It might also be used by other tools, e.g. one might only trust Simple packages.  Not all fields are used by all tools, and several of them do not affect the operation of the library (e.g. Home-page).

All right, so why would cabal want to avoid compiling the Setup.hs? Of course this behaviour of cabal's means that I in the future will use *Custom* all the time, since I otherwise have to remember this surprising feature of a tool I never use. Is there any reason *not* to do this? Cheers, M -- Magnus Therning                        (OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4) magnus＠therning．org          Jabber: magnus＠therning．org http://therning.org/magnus         identi.ca|twitter: magthe