[Haskell-cafe] Notes and questions from a first-time Cabal user.

[Brian Smith]

I succeeded in getting my project to build under Cabal. As I converted
my makefile to Cabal, I took some notes about things that I found
unintuitive, so that the documentation can be improved for future new
users. There are some questions mixed in as well.

I am using GHC, Cabal, Happy, Alex, and Haddock, all from the CVS
head, all built with GHC 6.2.2, all executing under MSYS 1.0's bash
2.04.0(1) on Windows XP Pro SP2.

* If I use "Executable: check-ocl2," then under Windows the
executable's name really becomes "check-ocl2.exe." This is desireable
behavior. But, this causes "Setup.hs copy" and "Setup.hs install" to
fail because it tries to copy a file named "check-ocl2" (without the
".exe"), which obviously doesn't exist. How can I get Cabal to
generate "check-ocl2.exe" on Windows and "check-ocl2" on all other
platforms, and have the "copy" and "install" commands work, without
using autoconf?

* What is the easiest way to create a "Setup.hs all" command,
analogous to "make all" that simply executes "configure." "build,"
"haddock," and "test" in sequence, stopping on the first failed step?

* The tutorial documentation should explain how to use tools like alex
and happy. As far as I could tell, the way to do this is to add
"Other-Modules: Module.Name.Of.Parser.y Module.Name.Of.Lexer.x" to
each executable/library stanza. But, I am not sure why this is
necessary, as it seems like it should be able to find them
automatically (i.e. without having to list them in the Other-Modules:
field)

* Is there some way to tell Cabal to generate all intermediate files
into a directory that is different than the source directory? I
usually keep all my sources in a "src" directory, and then generate
all .hi, .o, and .hs files from Happy and Alex into a "build"
directory alongside it. This way, my "src" directory only contains
stuff that belongs in my version control repository, and "make clean"
was simply "rm -Rf build."

* If I run "runghc ./Setup.hs" I get this message:
    No command given (try --help).
This is confusing because it isn't clear that it is a cabal error
message and not a runghc error message. That is, it isn't clear
whether to run "runghc --help" or "runghc Setup.hs --help," and both
commands are valid. The message should be improved, or "--help" should
be the default command.

* Chapter 2 needs to be updated to replace "Hs-Source-Dir" with
"Hs-Source-Dirs," since Hs-Source-Dir is deprecated.

* It is unintuitive that the examples in chapter 2 use mixed case
(e.g. "Hs-Source-Dir") while the program issues error messages using
lowercase only ("hs-source-dir").

* Chapter 2 of the documentation states that identifiers can contain
underscores. However, Cabal gives "*** Exception: Line 1: Parse of
field 'name' failed" if I use "Name: ocl2_haskell" whereas "Name:
ocl2haskell" works fine.

* Chapter 2 of the documentation states that identifiers must start
with a letter. However, "Name: 2" is parsed without complaint.

* Chapter 2 of the documentation states that idenfiers must start with
a letter. However, "letter" is not defined. Presumably the intention
is to restrict identifiers to English letters only?

* I originally put my "Build-depends: base" in an "Executable:"
stanza. This seems reasonable because presumably different executables
(and libraries) could have different dependencies, and it is
advantageous to keep track of dependencies on a fine-grained basis.
Yet, Cabal requires the Build-depends to be in the main stanza. Why is
this? Couldn't Cabal combine all the Build-Depends it finds into the
one that it puts into the final package specification?

For example, my unit tests require HUnit, but nothing else does.
Should I put my unit tests into a seperate package?

* The error message for putting "Build-depends: base" in an
"Executable: " stanza is:
    "*** Exception: Line 10: Unknown field 'build-depends'
but I think it would be better to say
    *** Exception: Line 10: field 'build-depends' does not apply to executables
or even better:
    *** Exception: Line 10: field 'build-depends' applies only to the
main stanza
(and similarly for other fields, e.g. "field 'main-is" applies only to
executables")

* Chapter 2 of the documentation states that I should be able to use
syntax like "foo > 1.2" in Build-depends, but I could not get "HUnit >
1.1" or "HUnit >= 1.1" to work; they fail with parser errors.

Regards,
Brian