Tests in Cabal

[Ross Paterson]

On Wed, Jan 09, 2008 at 01:39:21PM +0000, Duncan Coutts wrote:
> I've only seen one package that actually uses tests integrated into the
> Setup.hs. So it seems everyone just runs tests manually. This is a
> fairly large hole in the Cabal story at the moment imho.
> 
> Part of the problem is that we don't support custom Setup.hs stuff very
> well, we encourage people to use the simple build system. But for tests,
> even if it used the simple build system we'd end up making it use the
> custom flavour just to run some tests. It's not very satisfactory.
> 
> I wonder if we shouldn't move tests into their own file completely. The
> problem always with custom Setup.hs scripts is that they're the first
> point of entry, and if it does not compile then everything is stuffed
> and you don't get a good error message.

Yes, I think a file-level hook for tests is the way to go.