On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 1:03 PM, Andrew
Coppin
This was not at all clear to me from reading the ticker.
OK, so I need to find another seperate tool in order to do this. I guess not every single Haskell user tries to release stuff to Hackage, while presumably most users want to install stuff from it. I could just about live with that. However, the following important question remains: If sdist is broken on Windows, and the developers know this, why does it just die with an unhelpful message? Why does it not say "this functionallity is not supported; you need to get this tool..."? Why did I have to do a custom search of closed tickets on the Trac to even find this information? Why is this not written in big, huge letters in the user guide? The fact that this is broken by default on every Windows box in the land seems like a rather big deal...
Seriously... when the next person behind me comes along and tries to do this, they're going to trip over in exactly the same way. All the Cabal guides I've seen so far recommend the use of sdist. (And, indeed, on any other OS it presumably works. It's just another thing you have to do differently if you happen to be on Windows.)
GHC already ships with Cabal, and half a dozen GNU utilities; would it have been so hard to just add tar.exe?
Anyway, I now [hopefully] have a way to fix my immediate problem. I hope the people in charge will do something to help the next guy behind me...
Personally, I've never used "runhaskell Setup sdist" and I've only ever used "cabal sdist". But I'm not sure where I learned that. I think cabal-install is a pretty standard util for people to have, and it ships with the Haskell platform now. So the big hurdle is documentation. Andrew - where does it state that "Setup sdist" is the recommended way of doing this? If it's a wiki you could go and edit it yourself. Antoine