On 17 January 2005 18:24, Malcolm Wallace wrote:

Isaac Jones writes:

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If it depends on posix, on a non-posix system, the user will get an error because the posix package doesn't exist.

If it doesn't depend on posix on a posix-based system, then ghc won't get the -package posix flag, and so cabal will fail to link.

There is a further problem: nhc98 has neither posix nor util packages, so a straightforward dependency on either would be wrong.

In general yes - in this particular case I don't see why nhc98 can't provide the unix package (not the posix package - that's the old non-hierarchical version, sorry for the confusion). There might be minor porting issues, but it's mostly just FFI code.

Simon Marlow writes:

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My gut feeling is that we should be able to say something like build-depends: if-not-os("mingw32",unix >= 1.0)

I would agree that we need platform-selected dependencies. Platform includes compiler, compiler version, OS, and possibly OS version.

Yup. Cheers, Simon