Helping out

[Duncan Coutts]

On Mon, 2007-08-13 at 00:10 +0100, Simon (Vsevolod) Ilyushchenko wrote:
> Got it, thanks.
> 
> Is there a time when I can hang out on #haskell (or other channel) to
> get some questions answered? For example, when trying to install cabal
> itself, running
> 
> ghc -v --make Setup.lhs -o setup
> currently fails for me with:

ghc-6.4 should be fine but yes you do need the filepath package. You can
get that from hackage.haskell.org.

When bootstrapping a new version of cabal, using "make setup" is the
simplest thing. That creates a ./setup program which you can use to run
the normal cabal commands like ./setup configure; ./setup build; ./setup
install

What I normally do when hacking on Cabal is to:

./setup register --user --inplace

That registers the development version of Cabal inplace, in the actual
build tree, so that means from then on, using the Cabal package means
using whatever you've currently got compiled in your local build tree.

Then using

./setup build

updates the already registered Cabal-1.1.7 without having to reinstall
or re-register. That's handy if one is testing building other packages
with the development version of Cabal interleaved with making changes to
Cabal.

So bear in mind that if you ./setup clean for example then you'll not be
breaking your registered Cabal-1.1.7 and you'' be unable to compile
anything against -package Cabal-1.1.7 until you ./setup build again.
That's not such a problem however since you can always specify using an
older version when building other things like -package Cabal-1.1.6.

Duncan