On 18 August 2010 12:55, Johannes Waldmann
Duncan Coutts
writes: Your .cabal file probably does not list the "other-modules" as it should, so Cabal does not know that the other modules exist.
Ah.
Strange though that it seems to be able to do lots of reasonable things (build the executable, build all the API docs) without this "other-modules" section.
Right. It is required but not enforced. If you forget with executables then usually nothing horrible happens. If you forget with libraries then you end up with a broken library. Enforcing it properly is on the TODO list.
I figure it's a cabal design choice, but I don't see the reason for it.
In general it is impossible to use dependency chasing to automatically discover all the modules/files required by a lib/exe because of things like conditional compilation. You can find out what is needed for the current configuration for the current machine, but that does not help with preparing source distributions where e.g. you might have different modules for windows vs unix.
It seems it just forces me to construct manually some information that the machine already knows.
Almost, see above. Certainly we could check when the information provided is wrong (by Cabal doing the dependency chasing rather than leaving it for the tools like ghc --make or haddock). What we cannot check is if it is right. Duncan