CCing Ian, since I seem to remember that he hacked on the makefile.
Frederik Eaton
Hi,
What's the reason for not resolving executables through PATH in the cabal Makefile?
No particularly good reason, afaik.
$ pwd /home/frederik/cabal-1.1.4 $ which ghc /home/frederik/arch/i386/bin/ghc $ make install mkdir -p dist/tmp /usr/bin/ghc --make -Wall -fno-warn-unused-matches -cpp -i. -odir dist/tmp -hidir dist/tmp Setup.lhs -o setup make: /usr/bin/ghc: Command not found make: *** [setup] Error 127
If I want to specify a different version of GHC than the one I normally use, then I could do:
$ PATH=special-version-dir:$PATH make install
similar to:
$ HCBASE=special-version-dir make install
which works now, right? One disadvantage to using PATH is in the case where you want to use the GHC in /usr/local, but some other tool in /usr.
Why the cabal makefile has to introduce a new variable HCBASE to achieve this functionality, I don't understand. It makes the normal user's life much harder by breaking a standard Unix abstraction layer; and at the same time it barely makes anyone else's life any easier.
It's only been a few years without anyone complaining ;)
Also, I think it is more standard to use PREFIX to refer to what appears as PREF in the makefile.
If no one has any objections, I'd be happy to apply a tested patch for this. peace, isaac