On Sun, 2009-01-18 at 18:35 +0000, Sebastian Sylvan wrote:
On a similar note, would it not be nice if cabal install understood about platforms and could tell you straight away that a package won't install under e.g. windows, rather then spending ages trying and then failing because a package tries to run a unix command?
We're pretty near to that. It does understand platforms. What we lack is in the information that it does not work. We can get it in two ways. One is if we cannot find sh.exe then we know straight away that all configure based packages will not work. We should be able to do similar things for packages that need C libs headers etc that we cannot find. We should only need manual additional info for a few packages. The tickets in this context are: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ticket/342 http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ticket/400
I always get a bit annoyed trying to do anything in windows with Haskell libraries, at the very least I'd like it to be clear from the start that something won't work (if it's by design) so I don't waste time trying. Ideally the hackage website would even allow you to filter packages by the OS you're using and would remove packages that won't build on that OS (by recursively checking dependencies too).
Yes, we should be able to use the same info on hackage as in cabal-install. So, as usual the limiting factor is the number of people hacking on the infrastructure. Time to get involved! :-) Duncan