HLint binary path

[Duncan Coutts]

On Sun, 2011-07-31 at 14:37 +0800, Neil Mitchell wrote:
> Hi Andrew,
> 
> I'm afraid I have no idea, I only use HLint on Windows, where it gets
> installed with all other Haskell binaries which is on the $PATH. I
> suspect the cabal-devel list will have an answer.
> 
> Thanks, Neil
> 
> On Sat, Jul 30, 2011 at 4:11 AM, Andrew Pennebaker
> <andrew.pennebaker at gmail.com> wrote:
> > HLint is very cool, but by default the binary is put
> > in ~/Library/Haskell/ghc-7.0.3/lib/hlint-1.8.13/bin without being added to
> > $PATH. Is there a cabal option to either put it in a directory known to
> > $PATH or add ~/Library/Haskell/ghc-7.0.3/lib/hlint-1.8.13/bin to $PATH as
> > part of the installation process?

For reasons I don't quite understand, the OSX HP installer modifies the
~/.cabal/config to put binaries in those locations and not into any
common directory that can be placed on the $PATH. You can change this to
use a single bin dir by editing your ~/.cabal/config.

We'll have to take it up with the people who prepare the HP on OSX to
get a proper solution.

I'm reminded that there's a bug in the symlink-bindir feature which
prevents symlinking into a common dir in the case that the actual bin
dir is different for each package. If we fix that then that would
provide another solution on OSX.

We'd still have the problem that there is no per-user location on OSX
that is in the user's $PATH, so there's nowhere we can install things
that will "Just Work" without any user intervention. The same is
actually true on Windows too, but for some reason it's acceptable to
modify the user's $PATH on Windows but not on OSX.

Duncan