problems getting cabal-install to work on CentOS

[Duncan Coutts]

On Mon, 2011-02-14 at 12:14 +0000, Chris Dornan wrote:
> Hi Duncan,

> I am pretty sure it was a tmp directory issue where the default tmp
> directory prohibited execution.

Ah hah. This did subsequently get reported by someone else

http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ticket/685


> Its main about documentation (I couldn’t find an explanation of how to
> control where Cabal puts its temporary files) and diagnostics –
> something to the effect that ‘I failed to execute this file’ – I was
> finding it very difficult to see what was happening. 

I bet.

http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ticket/696


Is /tmp noexec by default on current redhat/centos releases? If so we'll
want to up the priority of these tickets.

If /tmp is noexec, do you know what is the recommend solution on these
platforms. For compiling packages we need to be able to compile and
execute programs. Is there some other location other than /tmp that we
should use?

I wonder if there's a quick and reliable method for testing for noexec,
rather than waiting until we get to the stage where we've unpacked the
package, compiled Setup and are trying to run it.

Duncan