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

[Henning Thielemann]

On Mon, 18 Aug 2008, 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).

I believe it's filepath. Actually, installing all of those packages is not 
so easy, because for installation of zlib you need zlib headers 
(zlib-devel package) and Cabal can't tell you! I think, cabal-install 
should be shipped in binary form, too, because compiling it manually is no 
fun. However, once cabal-install runs you won't like to miss it anymore.