I wrote:
In the meantime, how about the following:
In default non-verbose mode, silently memoize the list of packages that were not found. Then, only if something goes wrong, say something like:
"The package failed to build. Perhaps the reason is that one of the following packages was not found:"
Neil Mitchell wrote:
That doesn't seem that helpful. On error, give a list of maybe 25 things that are missing, only to find out that you're running GHC 6.4.1 on Windows which no one ever tried before. It's not really narrowing the cause of the error too much anyway.
Oh, I agree completely. Clearly it would be great if Cabal could process and report dependencies in a more meaningful way. However, if that will take more time before it can happen, I am just supporting what a few other people have already suggested in this thread as an easy first step. These do not require any change in the way Cabal processes things - just the way messages are printed. I am just combining a few things already said : o Verbose and non-verbose options. o Always show information if something really went wrong. o Include a message that may help people not to panic as much. -Yitz