Helping out

[Simon (Vsevolod) Ilyushchenko]

Hi,

> 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

Installing any packages with --user option leads to error messages about missing
/home/user/.ghc/i386-linux-6.4.2/package.conf

> 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.

As for trying to install the latest cabal-install with the latest
cabal (registered globally), I get this error:
Setup.lhs: cabal-install.cabal:12: Unknown field 'build-type'

The Build-type field is present in the checked-out tree, so presumably
I'm still using the old Cabal somehow.

I can hang out at #haskell today.