Judah, Thank you for responding. On May 6, 2009, at 12:17 PM, Judah Jacobson wrote:

On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 10:27 PM, brian wrote:

...

Here's the relevant bits :

checking for readline in -lreadline... yes checking for rl_readline_version... yes checking for rl_begin_undo_group... no configure: error: readline not found, so this package cannot be built

Looks like it found readline, and then decided it didn't ?

It's finding the system install of readline, which is really editline, so it later rejects it for not having enough functionality.

The other problem is that I can't figure out the location of the build directory. The program ask you to check config.log, which seems like a very reasonable thing to do, but I can't find it anywhere. Anywhere, being in .cabal. Is the build dir being removed on failure ?

...

I'm having fairly consisten problems with cabal packages needing symlinks in /usr/local to work properly, i.e. it can't seem to find libraries in /sw/lib where fink puts them.

Is that a cabal problem or a ghc issue ?

For the readline package you can use cabal configure --configure-option=--extra-include-dirs=/sw/include --configure-option=--extra-lib-dirs=/sw/lib

uh, that doesn't work :-( $ cabal configure --configure-option=--extra-include-dirs=/sw/include --configure-option=--with-readline-includes=".." --configure-option=-- with-readline-libraries=".." cabal: No cabal file found. Please create a package description file <pkgname>.cabal However, I understood what you were trying to do, and figured out the following command, which _did_ work ! cabal install readline --extra-include-dirs=/sw/include --configure- option=--with-readline-includes="/sw/include" --configure-option=-- with-readline-libraries="/sw/lib" yeah! I'm not sure if the --extra-include-dirs is needed, it seem like maybe just the --configure-option flags would have been enough. Now if only I could remember what I was trying to install when readline failed to install :-)

which passes the necessary arguments to the autoconf script which the readline package uses.

Other Cabal packages may behave better with cabal configure --extra-include-dirs="..." and --extra-lib-dirs="..."

... ?? Why should they behave better ?? Cabal really needs some additional debugging flags of some sort. It's fairly painful to figure out the problem if it fails. Thanks again, Brian