[Haskell-cafe] "build depends:" in a .cabal file

[Derek Elkins]

On Mon, 2008-08-18 at 14:30 -0700, Jason Dagit wrote:
> 2008/8/18 Galchin, Vasili <vigalchin at gmail.com>:
> >
> >
> >> .
> >>
> >> If by "faulting in" you mean downloading and installing missing
> >> dependencies, then that's exactly what the cabal-install tool does.
> >
> >        This is exactly by "faulting in" .. an analogy ...
> >
> >        Installing cabal-install seems to be a chicken and egg problem
> > if enough packages are not already installed ... if not enough then  one
> > (me) can die of a thousand paper cuts bootstrapping packages up to where
> > cabal-install can be installed. I am running Ubuntu Linux. Cabl-install is
> > written in Haskell? If so, is there a pre-compiled Cabal-install that I can
> > just install with all dependencies (packages) including. I also want to
> > install HaskellDB painlessly ;^) ??
> 
> In my experience, with recent GHC there are only 3 packages needed to
> install cabal-install and it's pretty painless.  You need zlib, HTTP
> and something else that I can't recall off the top of my head (but it
> tells you).  Each of these packages can be had from hackage and they
> are very standard cabal installations.  Sometimes you also need to
> upgrade cabal; I don't think this was an issue with ghc 6.8.2 and
> newer though.
> 
> Cabal-install is worth the pain.  Once you have a recent cabal-install
> it becomes painless to try out new packages via Hackage.  And we have
> some very cool packages there these days.  I really need to get all my
> side projects there so people can play with them.
> 
> </advocating>

Don't forget that once you get cabal-install going the first time you
can upgrade via cabal install cabal-install.