2009/6/30 Don Stewart <dons@galois.com>

The cabal file lists zlib as a dependency:

extra-libraries: z

however, what 'z' means varies from distro to distro. Ultimately, your
package manager has to solve this.

-- Don

Thanks for the reply, but I see two problems with this

1. cabal-install depends on zlib, so the .cabal file is not a help in this case.

2. Even if I did know that cabal-install was the usual package manager (saw one person today on Haskell Cafe that didn't) and thought to look in the .cabal file, then "extra-libraries: z" still wouldn't have helped me, as a human, know to install zlibc, zlib1g and zlib1g-dev.

3) one for luck, Debian doesn't have a package for cabal-install or the haskell zlib library, so it can't solve this for me either. Unless it can use .cabal files, and why would I know this and what would the commands be?

I had to completely remove Cabal and GHC and then spend 2 days resolving dependencies to get it working with the latest versions on OSX Tiger as well, so it's not as if this is a one off problem, unless I'm the problem. Therefore I think some human readable text on Hackage would be helpful.

Iain