[Haskell-cafe] "build depends:" in a .cabal file

[Jason Dagit]

2008/8/18 Galchin, Vasili <vigalchin at gmail.com>:
>
>
>> .
>>
>> If by "faulting in" you mean downloading and installing missing
>> dependencies, then that's exactly what the cabal-install tool does.
>
>        This is exactly by "faulting in" .. an analogy ...
>
>        Installing cabal-install seems to be a chicken and egg problem
> if enough packages are not already installed ... if not enough then  one
> (me) can die of a thousand paper cuts bootstrapping packages up to where
> cabal-install can be installed. I am running Ubuntu Linux. Cabl-install is
> written in Haskell? If so, is there a pre-compiled Cabal-install that I can
> just install with all dependencies (packages) including. I also want to
> install HaskellDB painlessly ;^) ??

In my experience, with recent GHC there are only 3 packages needed to
install cabal-install and it's pretty painless.  You need zlib, HTTP
and something else that I can't recall off the top of my head (but it
tells you).  Each of these packages can be had from hackage and they
are very standard cabal installations.  Sometimes you also need to
upgrade cabal; I don't think this was an issue with ghc 6.8.2 and
newer though.

Cabal-install is worth the pain.  Once you have a recent cabal-install
it becomes painless to try out new packages via Hackage.  And we have
some very cool packages there these days.  I really need to get all my
side projects there so people can play with them.

</advocating>
Jason