[Haskell-cafe] A Cabal problem

[Duncan Coutts]

On Mon, 2008-05-05 at 13:37 -0400, Mario Blazevic wrote:
> Trevor Elliott wrote:
> > Hi Mario,
> > 
> > Is the name of the module within the Shell.hs file Main?  If not, that
> > could be your problem.
> 
> 	You may be right, the module's name is Shell, not Main. GHC does not
> have problem with that when "--main-is Shell" option is specified on the
> command line. Is Cabal different? Is this documented somewhere?

The ghc flag and the cabal field happen to have the same name but they
do not mean quite the same thing.

The ghc flag means "this *module* is the Main module, despite whatever
the real name of the module might be" while the cabal flag means "this
*file* is the Main module". The cabal concept is portable between all
supported Haskell implementations and the ghc flag is ghc-specific.

For the moment we have decided not to provide any support for this
ghc-specific feature:

http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ticket/179

Do please add your comments/opinions to that ticket.

Duncan