[Haskell-cafe] Cabal fun [Half-integer]

[Andrew Coppin]

Derek Elkins wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 28, 2009 at 4:11 PM, Antoine Latter<aslatter at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> On Sun, Jun 28, 2009 at 3:42 PM, Andrew
>> Coppin<andrewcoppin at btinternet.com> wrote:
>>     
>>> Ah. Apparently it's "fixed":
>>>
>>> http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ticket/40
>>>       
>>> Except that it isn't fixed. Yay for me..
> If one actually reads the discussion in the ticket, it is clear that
> the conclusion was to have cabal-install handle it and that
> cabal-install uses it's own tar implementation.
>   

This was not at all clear to me from reading the ticker.

OK, so I need to find another seperate tool in order to do this. I guess 
not every single Haskell user tries to release stuff to Hackage, while 
presumably most users want to install stuff from it. I could just about 
live with that. However, the following important question remains: If 
sdist is broken on Windows, and the developers know this, why does it 
just die with an unhelpful message? Why does it not say "this 
functionallity is not supported; you need to get this tool..."? Why did 
I have to do a custom search of closed tickets on the Trac to even find 
this information? Why is this not written in big, huge letters in the 
user guide? The fact that this is broken by default on every Windows box 
in the land seems like a rather big deal...

Seriously... when the next person behind me comes along and tries to do 
this, they're going to trip over in exactly the same way. All the Cabal 
guides I've seen so far recommend the use of sdist. (And, indeed, on any 
other OS it presumably works. It's just another thing you have to do 
differently if you happen to be on Windows.)

GHC already ships with Cabal, and half a dozen GNU utilities; would it 
have been so hard to just add tar.exe?

Anyway, I now [hopefully] have a way to fix my immediate problem. I hope 
the people in charge will do something to help the next guy behind me...