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

[Antoine Latter]

On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 1:03 PM, Andrew
Coppin<andrewcoppin at btinternet.com> wrote:
>
> 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...
>

Personally, I've never used "runhaskell Setup sdist" and I've only
ever used "cabal sdist". But I'm not sure where I learned that.

I think cabal-install is a pretty standard util for people to have,
and it ships with the Haskell platform now. So the big hurdle is
documentation.

Andrew - where does it state that "Setup sdist" is the recommended way
of doing this? If it's a wiki you could go and edit it yourself.

Antoine