Running the Cabal tests

[Erik de Castro Lopo]

Edward Z. Yang wrote:

> package-tests currently has a dumb hack to figure out these environment
> variables: it tries to read out the local build information associated
> with your build of Cabal. 

Thank you Ed. That explains some bizare behaviour I'm seeing.

> Unfortunately, this format is extremely backwards incompatible,

Not only that, but the assumption that we're currently testing with the
same version of GHC that cabal-install was compiled with is really not 
very sound.

For instance in my Jenkins build instance I have a number of GHC versions
installed in /usr/lib/ghc-7.8/ , /usr/lib/ghc-7.10 and /usr/lib/ghc-8.0
but I only have one version of cabal-install in /usr/bin that was compiled
with ghc-7.10.

Since cabal-install is supposed to be buildable with the last two verions
of GHC, I've been trying to build it in my Jenkins instance with ghc-7.8.
Building has been fine, but I'm now trying to get tests working and that's
when I ran into this problem.

So, do you think package-tests can be fixed so it will work the way I'm
trying to use it or should I just have GHC version specific versions of
cabal-install when I want to build and run the tests for cabal?

Erik
-- 
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Erik de Castro Lopo
http://www.mega-nerd.com/