[Haskell-cafe] cabal-install failure

[Duncan Coutts]

On Fri, 2008-06-13 at 22:10 -0400, Gwern Branwen wrote:

> I think this may be Cabal's fault anyway. The yi.cabal includes the line:
>          build-tools:   alex >= 2.0.1 && < 3
> 
> in the 'executable yi' section, right after the build-depends, so Yi
> is being straightforward and upfront about its needs. Now, Cabal is
> obviously checking that the build-depends is satisfied first, but why
> isn't it checking that alex is available when it has the information
> it needs to check, presumably anything in build-tools is *required*,
> and the field name suggests that it would be checked?

Yes, you're right. This is the ticket you filed last time:

http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ticket/227

and my comment:

        One problem is that not all build-tools correspond to haskell
        packages. Some do some don't. We have a hard coded list of them
        at the moment (which can be extended in Setup.hs files) so we
        could extend that with what haskell package if any the tools
        correspond to. Any better suggestions to make it a tad more
        generic?

If anyone has a godd suggestion I'm happy to hear it. Otherwise we can
just add a Maybe Dependency to the Program type to indicate that some
build tools have a corresponding haskell package.

Duncan