what is --scratchdir= for?

[Duncan Coutts]

On Fri, 2007-08-10 at 23:10 +0300, Esa Ilari Vuokko wrote:
> On 8/10/07, ross at soi.city.ac.uk <ross at soi.city.ac.uk> wrote:
> > I also think an option to move dist would introduce too many complications.
> 
> Lack of such option, in my opinion, shows how immature Cabal is as a build tool.
> I'd use the option if it existed, even with the drawbacks.

As I said to Ross, I think this would be possible and there are a couple
options we might choose.

> However, I agree this might be too much for now - there's more important things
> broken in Cabal, and there's not enough developers.

I gave a 10 min talk at AngloHaskell on "Cabal needs you!" and several
people expressed an interest in taking a look at Cabal refactoring, bug
fixing or improving cabal-install. And if we can fix the mailing list
issues...

> Too bad adding the option is likely to only get harder as Cabal expands and gets
> more users who rely on current behavior.

Cheer up! :-)

I don't see how users rely on the current behaviour. At the moment the
dist directory is fixed relative to the source tree. Allowing the user
to change that would only change things for users who choose to do that.
All the internal code is relative to the distPref value.

Duncan