bootstrapping

[Duncan Coutts]

On Thu, 2007-08-16 at 17:17 +0100, Malcolm Wallace wrote:
> As a newbie to the cabal-devel list, I don't know whether this question
> has already been thought about much, and perhaps even has a really good
> answer.
> 
> I notice that the Cabal darcs repo now has a Cabal.cabal file that uses
> configurations.  Presumably this is self-bootstrapping.  But is it still
> possible to upgrade an older version of Cabal (e.g. supplied with
> ghc-6.2) to the latest version, using only the older version of Cabal
> itself?

We've never supported building with an older version of cabal, but
fortunately that's never necessary since it can always self-bootstrap:

ghc -i. --make Setup.lhs -o setup

No makefiles or scripts required.

I thought previously that the -i. was not necessary as ghc should look
at the local files in preference to any existing registered Cabal
package but although it compiles the local files it seems to still link
to the existing package. Or something else similarly weird. In fact I've
no idea what's going on there just that it works with -i. and it doesn't
always without.

Duncan