[Haskell-cafe] writing a good Setup.hs is *hard* (was: broken on install encoding 0.6.6)

[Antoine Latter]

On Wed, Aug 17, 2011 at 9:11 AM, Rogan Creswick <creswick at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 17, 2011 at 6:29 AM, Gang <yugang.bj at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> sorry to bother
>>
>
> Not in the least!
>
> I was trying to figure out what problem you were encountering, and I
> learned a lot.  I never did recreate your problem, but in the process
> I ran into a whole host of other annoyances and strange situations
> relating to slightly broken cabal files and cabal build intricacies
> that confound our existing tools.

I think the only way to do this sort of thing today is to take the
complexity in the Setup.hs and put it in its own executable. Then you
can package up the executable with Cabal and specify proper
dependencies, and then in the original package require the new
executable as a build tool.

(You might be able to perform a magic trick to get the build-tool
treated as a proper dependency that Cabal will install for you, but
that is only implied by
http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ticket/227 ).

I swear this discussion has come up before, but I can't find anything
in the mail-list archives for cabal-dev, or on Trac.

The downside, of course, is that you have to be able to thread your
install logic through a command-line tool, which may not work well in
this case.

Antoine