[Haskell-cafe] Re: 1,000 packages, so let's build a few!

[Duncan Coutts]

On Mon, 2009-02-02 at 13:22 +0000, John Lato wrote:
> Duncan Coutts wrote:
> >
> > Some are trivial and should be done away with. For example the ones that
> > just check if a C header / lib is present are unnecessary (and typically
> > do not work correctly). The next point release of Cabal can do these
> > checks automatically, eg:
> >
> >        Configuring foo-1.0...
> >        cabal: Missing dependencies on foreign libraries:
> >        * Missing header file: foo.h
> >        * Missing C libraries: foo, bar, baz
> >        This problem can usually be solved by installing the system
> >        packages that provide these libraries (you may need the "-dev"
> >        versions). If the libraries are already installed but in a
> >        non-standard location then you can use the flags
> >        --extra-include-dirs= and --extra-lib-dirs= to specify where
> >        they are.
> 
> Thank you!  Thank you!  Thank you!

Gleb Alexeyev did the majority of the work on this one. I'm most
grateful to him for heeding my recent calls for more volunteers for
Cabal hacking.

> For those of us who want to write cross-platform (i.e. Windows)
> bindings to C libraries, this is great news.

Yes. The next step will be for the cabal-install dependency planner to
use this information and to complain at the planning stage rather than
failing once it starts to try to build things.

Duncan