On Mon, 18 Aug 2008, Jason Dagit wrote:

2008/8/18 Galchin, Vasili <vigalchin@gmail.com>:

If by "faulting in" you mean downloading and installing missing
dependencies, then that's exactly what the cabal-install tool does.

      This is exactly by "faulting in" .. an analogy ...

      Installing cabal-install seems to be a chicken and egg problem
if enough packages are not already installed ... if not enough then  one
(me) can die of a thousand paper cuts bootstrapping packages up to where
cabal-install can be installed. I am running Ubuntu Linux. Cabl-install is
written in Haskell? If so, is there a pre-compiled Cabal-install that I can
just install with all dependencies (packages) including. I also want to
install HaskellDB painlessly ;^) ??

In my experience, with recent GHC there are only 3 packages needed to
install cabal-install and it's pretty painless.  You need zlib, HTTP
and something else that I can't recall off the top of my head (but it
tells you).

I believe it's filepath. Actually, installing all of those packages is not so easy, because for installation of zlib you need zlib headers (zlib-devel package) and Cabal can't tell you! I think, cabal-install should be shipped in binary form, too, because compiling it manually is no fun. However, once cabal-install runs you won't like to miss it anymore.