On 16 March 2012 21:56, Erik de Castro Lopo
Joachim Breitner wrote:
no, cabal-install does not automatically install build-tools at all, only Cabal checks them for compilation. I guess the reason is that build-tools needs to be put on the PATH, and that is beyond the scope of cabal-install.
This is rather sub-optimal.
It is, but the only way it would work is for cabal-install be much closer to a _real_ package management system: * Needs to keep track of installed packages. This is achieved in recent versions with a ~/.cabal/world file. * Keep track of which versions are installed. The world file states which versions it was *told* to install, not which are currently installed. For libraries, it doesn't matter: it gets that information from ghc-pkg. For binaries, this doesn't work (since there's no required standard for version reporting in Haskell build-tools). * Ensure that binaries are installed to somewhere in the PATH (not possible AFAIK). One trivial solution is to assume ~/.cabal/bin is on the PATH and to ignore system-wide packages, which I think is even *more* sub-optimal (why install a new version of alex when it's already available?). -- Ivan Lazar Miljenovic Ivan.Miljenovic@gmail.com http://IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com