[Haskell-cafe] Cabal and WinHugs

[Duncan Coutts]

On Sun, 2009-04-12 at 20:02 -0700, Iavor Diatchki wrote:
> Hello,
> What is the preferred way to install a cabal package so that it works
> with winhugs?  When I tried "cabal install --user --hugs" I got an
> error that it could not find "hugsffi".  I managed to get things
> working by manually downloading the package, and extracting the
> appropriate source directories to the "packages" folder of winhugs
> (i.e., basically skipping cabal) but this is kind of clunky. So to
> summarize, here are my two questions:
>   1. Am I doing something wrong, or does "cabal" not support WinHugs?, and
>   2. Does WinHugs have a user specific "packages" folder (so that each
> user can have their own set of packages)?

I've never tried with winhugs and to be honest we don't test much with
hugs either. Don't take that as a discouragement though, it'd be great
to have better support for hugs and winhugs in the cabal tool. All it
needs is someone to pay it a little attention.

For the specific issue, does winhugs come with the hugsffi tool? I
expect that it should do though perhaps it's hidden away in some
directory.

I believe that by default hugs uses $HOME/lib/packages/* for per-user
packages. I'm not quite sure what winhugs does. It'd be good to adjust
the defaults to make this "just work".

Duncan