Integrating tools with Cabal

[Mikhail Glushenkov]

Hi Roman,

On Fri, Nov 9, 2012 at 9:10 AM, Roman Cheplyaka <roma at ro-che.info> wrote:
> Thanks for the suggestion.
>
> Is the "protocol" between Cabal and ghc described anywhere, or do I need
> to read the sources for that?

No, I don't think that it's documented separately. The code is not
very complicated, though - see buildLib/buildExe in
Distribution.Simple.GHC.

> Also, is there a way to write a program that would be equivalent to
> "cabal configure && cabal build" without relying on cabal-install or ghc
> being installed, just by using the Cabal library? I realise that it
> would only work for build-type: Simple, but it might be still useful.

'cabal build' is equivalent to 'runhaskell Setup.hs build'
'cabal configure' is mostly equivalent to 'runhaskell Setup.hs
configure --user', but uses preferences from ~/.cabal/config.
So I think that you can just ship a compiled Setup.hs with your
analyser, but you will have to trick 'configure' into thinking that
you have all dependencies for the packages that you're compiling
installed (basically you'll have to provide a fake 'ghc-pkg' that
supports the 'dump' command - with ghc installed, you can just invoke
the real ghc-pkg).

> I tried this, and one problem I ran into is that Cabal invokes the
> linker on the files that it expects my tool to produce. 'ld' fails, and
> the build aborts.

So you're building a library. Looking at buildLib in
Distribution.Simple.GHC I don't see a way to stop the build before the
linking phase. But your tool should have already processed all the
source files at this stage. Maybe you can produce some dud .o files to
placate ld or just print a message that says something like "Analysis
complete. Don't worry about the link failure."?

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