In message <46FA3EFF.3020106@imn.htwk-leipzig.de> Johannes Waldmann
Duncan Coutts wrote:
Something we should encourage in this transition which will make things less disruptive in future is to get people to use "build-type: Simple" in their .cabal files and not use Setup.hs files at all.
sounds great - how does it work? (what to do instead of "runhaskell Setup.hs configure" then?)
cabal-setup configure cabal-setup build cabal-setup install etc. The command line interface is exactly the same. cabal-setup is a wrapper program that manages compiling the Setup.hs script if necessary or if the package is using the 'Simple' build type (and the version of Cabal required by the package is compatible with the one cabal-setup was built with) then it calls into the Cabal lib directly. This is a bit quicker and is useful for simplicity and security. For example the VisualStudio plugin has never supported running Setup.hs scripts so it has effectively only ever used the 'Simple' build type. Many people are nervous about the security implications of running Setup scripts since they can perform arbitrary IO actions. Calling the Cabal lib directly is a little better. You can grab cabal-setup now from: http://darcs.haskell.org/cabal-setup/ and I hope it will also be included in the 'extralibs' tarball that will be released at the same time as ghc-6.8.1. Duncan