[GHC] #5994: Consider adding a flag to ghc's configure to automatically bootstrap and install cabal-install along with ghc

[GHC]

#5994: Consider adding a flag to ghc's configure to automatically bootstrap and
install cabal-install along with ghc
---------------------------------+------------------------------------------
    Reporter:  td123             |       Owner:                  
        Type:  feature request   |      Status:  new             
    Priority:  normal            |   Milestone:                  
   Component:  Build System      |     Version:  7.4.1           
    Keywords:                    |          Os:  Unknown/Multiple
Architecture:  Unknown/Multiple  |     Failure:  None/Unknown    
  Difficulty:  Unknown           |    Testcase:                  
   Blockedby:                    |    Blocking:                  
     Related:                    |  
---------------------------------+------------------------------------------

Comment(by td123):

 The issue I wanted to bring up and address is that there is confusion
 about the point of including cabal-install along with ghc sources.

 "The reason that the cabal-install sources are in the GHC tree is that the
 cabal-install repo was merged with the Cabal repo, and GHC needs Cabal.
 The other dependencies of cabal-install, like zlib, HTTP and network are
 not included in the GHC tree, so it's not a simple matter of building and
 shipping cabal-install."

 cabal-install (including the source included with ghc 7.4.1) does have a
 boostrap script which in theory should install everything for you but
 didn't work because of unresolved dependency versions with ghc 7.4.1.

 "I realise there are problems here, but I don't think shipping cabal-
 install with GHC is the right solution. The whole point of the Haskell
 Platform was so that we could decouple GHC development from the business
 of packaging and distributing a polished Haskell system, and moving cabal-
 install (and its dependencies) back into GHC is going in the wrong
 direction."

 This is also a good stance. Could cabal-install be deleted with future ghc
 releases? It's just confusing to randomly find cabal-install in the ghc
 released source.

 "It seems to me that most of the issues would go away if there was a
 timely cabal-install release soon after a GHC release. Furthermore, old
 cabal-install binaries work just fine with new GHC releases (that's how
 I've been getting along, anyway)."

 Since this doesn't really relate to ghc directly, take it as my view on
 the current situation:

 +++1 this. It pains me to hear when people recommend a development version
 of cabal-install as being the best solution, especially to newcomers. It's
 supposed to be a core part of the experience imo. The last official stable
 release 0.10.2 is also commented as being buggy by most people I've met.

 I know you can reuse this, but what happens to distros that try to package
 a cabal-install compatible with the latest stable ghc? Those distros are
 forced to hold back the old version of cabal-install until someone
 releases another cabal-install-ghcXX. Not to mention this creates more
 problems because of subtle changes between library versions.

 Some examples, arch right now uses cabal-install-ghc74 0.10.4 from
 hackage. Debian sid I think hasn't rebuilt a cabal-install 0.10.2 even
 though sid provides it. (I think sid also has a ghc 6 which they use to
 build cabal-install) Fedora uses cabal-install 0.13.3 for ghc 7.4.1 in
 rawhide. Gentoo uses cabal-install 0.13.3 for ghc 7.4.1 Ubuntu uses cabal-
 install 0.10.2

 Thanks for your time btw.

-- 
Ticket URL: <http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/5994#comment:3>
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