portability and .cabal files?

[Thomas Schilling]

On Fri, 2007-11-23 at 09:22 +0000, Ross Paterson wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 23, 2007 at 02:34:43AM +0000, Duncan Coutts wrote:
> > On Fri, 2007-11-23 at 01:42 +0000, Ross Paterson wrote:
> > > I guess you could indicate that a package won't build in some
> > > configuration using the buildable field.  Hackage ought to learn
> > > to use that too.
> > 
> > Oh you mean we should say:
> > 
> > if os(windows)
> >   -- this package is known not to work on windows
> >   buildable: false
> > 
> > and then cabal should fail on configuration, and cabal-install should
> > not consider depending on that package in that configuration?
> 
> It's not ideal, because buildable is a per-component thing, but I think
> Cabal already fails if none of the components is buildable.

Well, for dependencies we only consider the library component anyways.
I don't think we currently have a way to specify dependencies on an
executable provided by a Cabal package.