Cabal bugs

[Duncan Coutts]

On Fri, 2008-03-07 at 13:48 +0000, Malcolm Wallace wrote:
> Duncan Coutts <duncan.coutts at worc.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
> 
> > That tells us what package names and versions are installed but it
> > doesn't help with finding out what the installed packages depend on or
> > what cpp flags they used or anything else. For that we need the
> > InstalledPackageInfo rather than the unconfigured .cabal files.
> 
> With respect, the nhc98 compiler neither has nor uses an
> InstalledPackageInfo for any package.  If Cabal wants that information,
> Cabal should (a) generate it, and (b) store it.  I don't see the point
> of duplicating all that machinery in nhc98, when we don't need it.
> Cabal is the package manager, after all.

Yes, absolutely. For Hugs Cabal already generates an
InstalledPackageInfo file and installs it with each package. We just
need to get it to do the same for nhc98 which will be trivial. The one
thing we'd need from nhc98 is for those generated files to be included
for the core packages that come with a standard nhc98 install. Cabal can
then take care of installing them for all packages the user installs
later.

So I guess we'd need to adapt the nhc98 build procedure a bit to use
Cabal to generate the info files so they can be included into the
install.

Does that sounds reasonable?

Duncan