"Setup.lhs: hope.cabal has been changed, please re-configure."

[Duncan Coutts]

On Wed, 2007-12-19 at 15:57 +0700, Peter Gammie wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Thanks for your efforts with Cabal, it seems to work really well.
> 
> Can I suggest a few improvements to the above error message:
> 
> 1. Provide a flag "--force" that says "OK, the user knows  
> best." (Sometimes I change the .cabal file trivially, and really just  
> want to build the thing.) Indeed, a lot of commands might usefully be  
> "--force"d.

Hmm, I'd rather not add a --force to anything. Where else would you want
--force?

Ideally we would just do whichever bits of re-configuring that are
necessary. With a dependency framework this should be quite possible as
we could treat each field in the .cabal file as a separate bit of info
with it's own timestamp etc.

> 2. It is a bit unsound to say "please re-configure". You may also need  
> to "clean", if in fact the .cabal file has changed significantly.

Really? Under what circumstances would that be necessary?

> So, to say that another way, the message provides both insufficient  
> and unnecessary advice, but I think it can be improved.

How about just re-running configure if we think it's necessary, and
using the previous configuration flags?

Duncan