john:
On Sat, Nov 29, 2008 at 11:41:03PM +0100, Daniel Fischer wrote:
Great, nothing I don't already have, so download the source tarball, unpack and ./configure --prefix=$HOME checking for a BSD-compatible install... /usr/bin/install -c checking whether build environment is sane... yes ... more configure output ... checking for drift-ghc... no configure: error: DrIFT not found get it from http://repetae.net/computer/haskell/DrIFT/
Huh? dafis@linux:~/jhc/jhc-0.5.20080307> which DrIFT /home/dafis/.cabal/bin/DrIFT dafis@linux:~/jhc/jhc-0.5.20080307> DrIFT --version Version DrIFT-2.2.3
Oh golly. I never put DrIFT on cabal, apparently whomever tried to cabalize it didn't include the ghc driver script, and also appeared to just drop the documentation from the package altogether. It is things like that that make it very hard to get behind cabal, why was DrIFT crippled just so it can be put on cabal? If cabal wasn't powerful enough to compile DrIFT, and we already had a perfectly good way of compiling it, why the need to shoehorn it in and cause this problem? sigh.
Sounds like a problem with the packaging of DrIFT for Hackage, not with Cabal per se. This can happen if the package author doesn't do the conversion from ad-hoc make systems to cabal -- metadata that was implicit in autoconf+make can be lost. Perhaps the DrIFT maintainer could package it correctly, so that it can be used with the ~1000 other libraries on Hackage. -- Don