On Fri, 2008-01-18 at 11:50 +0000, Adrian Hey wrote:
Personally I'm not at all sure that having users specify all this stuff on the command line is a good idea.
I thought policy was that (ideally) all users should have to do is type.. runghc Setup configure runghc Setup build ..etc
Or even better: cabal install Or even better than that, is to not bother downloading, untaring and just say: cabal install xmonad This works now, and I encourage everyone on this list to try it out and report issues. Currently you need the darcs versions of the Cabal lib and cabal-install. It also needs released versions of the zlib and HTTP packages.
If users don't like the defaults defined in the .cabal file they can always edit it (that way they have a record of what was actually used to build the package). I habitually add -split-objs to the ghc-options of stuff I download, for example. I have read about --enable-split-objs, I just don't like using it.
The idea is that end users do not need to edit the .cabal flags. That requires too much manual intervention and gets in the way of automatically installing dependencies if each one has to be customised by manually downloading, unpacking, editing and installing.
I do use --enable-library-profiling habitually, but only because I haven't figured out how to put this in the .cabal file :-)
You'll be able to stick your favourite defaults in the config file for cabal-install, and they'll get used every time. Currently many options but not all can be set in the cabal-install config file. We should extend that to all the configure options. Also, to make life easier, cabal-install already supports bash command line flag completion to save your typing fingers. Duncan