[Fwd: Bug and Features Cabal]

[Ross Paterson]

On Mon, Apr 23, 2007 at 09:20:26AM +0100, Simon Marlow wrote:
> Forwarding on behlaf of Hans van Thiel <hthiel.char at zonnet.nl>.
> [...]
> I did not succeed in installing my own program myself with Cabal,
> configuration seemed to work fine, but build gave a message that source
> files could not be found. I have not tried it yet, but maybe the above
> was the problem. (It's not serious, it's a simple utility with no
> dependencies and just compiling is sufficient.)

The problem is the line "ghc-options: -o".  Perhaps you meant -O (in
future releases of Cabal this will be the default, adjustable from the
configure command line).

Hans has implicitly assumed that the constraints and warnings of
HackageDB should at least trigger warnings when building with Cabal (or
that HackageDB would have no additional constraints).  There's something
to be said for that.  Currently, these are:
 * HackageDB requires that the base name of the .cabal file is identical
   to the name of the package.
 * HackageDB requires that parsing and printing the version number should
   give the original string; this fails for version numbers with redundant
   leading zeroes, like 5.04.
 * In addition to Cabal warnings, HackageDB warns about
    - missing category, description, maintainer and synopsis fields
    - over-long synopsis fields
    - exposed modules that use unallocated top-level names in the module
      hierarchy