cabal-install failure: yi

Duncan Coutts duncan.coutts at worc.ox.ac.uk
Fri Jun 13 19:25:02 EDT 2008


On Fri, 2008-06-13 at 16:54 -0400, Darrin Thompson wrote:
> I'm reposting this here as something bad appeared to happen to my post
> on haskell-cafe and I probably should have posted here anyway.

It did make it though and here is the reply that I posted to
haskell-cafe.

Further to that, do feel free to add a feature request ticket to suggest
the we look into doing the configure phase of every package before doing
the build phase of any:
http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/

> Configuring yi-0.3...
> Warning: Instead of 'ghc-options: -DDYNAMIC -DFRONTEND_VTY' use
> 'cpp-options: -DDYNAMIC -DFRONTEND_VTY'
> setup: alex version >=2.0.1 && <3 is required but it could not be found.
> cabal: Error: some packages failed to install:
> yi-0.3 failed during the configure step. The exception was:
> exit: ExitFailure 1
> 
> Is this a cabal problem of package problem? I would have expected it
> to fail immediately instead of discover this problem so far into
> process.

So it's failing when configuring yi because alex is not installed.

So the question is when should this get checked? I think it's not
unreasonable to have the check where it is now though perhaps we could
do better by bringing it forward.

The point is, cabal-install only checks that haskell packages are
available before beginning to install stuff. It leaves all the other
checks (build tools, C libs, custom checks in Setup.hs script etc) to be
done at the configure phase of each package.

In theory it's not impossible to imagine doing the configure phase of
every package before doing the build phase of any package but it's not
clear that it gains us that much and it's a bit more complex to do it
that way.

Duncan




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