On Thu, 2010-11-25 at 11:16 +0100, Axel Simon wrote:
Dear Libraries,
this message is on shortcomings of cabal with respect to automatically installing the gtk package which (a) depends on a package that contains only build tools (i.e. only binaries) and (b) has a big custom Haskell file Gtk2HsSetup.hs that Setup.hs has to import (and which is required in any package in the Gtk2Hs suite). This file is copied into every package of the Gtk2Hs suite which is a pain to maintain.
I don't have any easy answers. The "right solution" for (a) is for cabal-install to track build tools (and C libs and all other dependencies, not just Haskell libs). For dependencies of Setup.hs, this is also hard. The original Cabal spec envisioned Setup.hs scripts being self-contained having no deps other than the base libs and Cabal itself, since this was intended as the primary user interface, so it must compile without a lot of fuss. In principle for some future Cabal spec revision we could add some way to declare that the build system itself requires certain dependencies. I also hope that the size of the Gtk2Hs Setup.hs can eventually be reduced by supporting c2hs in Cabal properly (i.e. including .chs dependencies). Duncan