[Haskell-cafe] Using cabal-install

[Duncan Coutts]

On Wed, 2008-06-18 at 22:44 +0200, Daniel Fischer wrote:
> Is there a tutorial/user's guide for cabal-install somewhere?
> My limited google skills haven't found one and I really need it, because there 
> MUST be a better way to get a package and its dependencies built and the 
> haddock documentation generated, installed and hyperlinked than manually 
> unpacking each .tar.gz and running cabal haddock there.

The feature you are looking for is not implemented yet.

        "cabal-install should be able to generate haddock docs"
        http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ticket/206

Go add your comments to that ticket and tell us how you think it should
work. I mean what command would you expect to run to have it work and
what would it do exactly?

A closely related feature and one it probably overlaps with is this
one: 

        "allow installing just specific bits, like just docs"
        http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ticket/225

so we should also think about what the user interface / mode of
interaction of this feature should be.

The issue is that previously we had separate commands for each phase so
it was obvious where to put various phase-specific flags. Now with
cabal-install's install command it does all the phases in one go.
Currently it takes just the flags that the configure command takes (plus
one or two others). So do we just make the install command take the
union of the flags of the other phases? And how to say that we want
optional phases like docs and tests.

That's basically the issue, how do we expect to interact with it? If it
can be relatively consistent and memorable then that's all the better.

We also want all flags that you can pass on the command line to be able
to be set as defaults in the ~/.cabal/config file. Currently there's
just a subset but we want to have it cover everything.


In general, adding yourself to the cc list of a ticket counts as a vote
for the importance of that ticket and commenting on why it's important
even more so (eg how painful and time consuming the alternative is).

Duncan