[Haskell-cafe] How outdated is Hugs?

[Duncan Coutts]

On Wed, 2009-01-28 at 12:35 -0800, Bryan O'Sullivan wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 1:18 PM, Duncan Coutts
> <duncan.coutts at worc.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
>         Not since then, no. However a lot of things work fine,
>         especially if you
>         use a newer Cabal version.
> 
> I've been unable to figure out how to build Cabal with Hugs
> 2006.09.04:
> 
> $ runhugs -98 Setup configure --hugs --prefix=/usr
> runhugs: Error occurred
> ERROR "./Distribution/Compat/ReadP.hs":70 - Syntax error in module
> definition (unexpected selector "#if")
> 
> 
> The README file is GHC-centric, so I'm at a bit of a dead end. Do you
> have any suggestions?

I'm not sure how it was ever supposed to work, that is bootstrapping
Cabal directly using runhugs on the Setup.hs script in the Cabal dir.
Cabal has always had some cpp in it and (as far as I know) hugs does not
have a -cpp flag. I presume the hugs build system has some workaround to
cpp all the files first.

The way I've tested it recently is to build the Setup.hs with ghc and
use that to install Cabal for hugs. From then on one can use runhugs to
run other Setup scripts.

If you can get the search path right (ie to not look in the current dir)
then I expect it would also be possible to bootstrap using a
pre-existing Cabal library for hugs.

Duncan