[Haskell-cafe] A cabal odyssey

[Andrew Coppin]

Duncan Coutts wrote:
> On 18 August 2010 18:13, Andrew Coppin <andrewcoppin at btinternet.com> wrote:
>
>   
>> Then again, all the links were broken anyway. They all had paths like
>> "C:\Program Files\Haskell\...whatever", and Mozilla apparently expects them
>> to say "file://C:/Program Files/Haskell/...whatever". It kept whining that
>> "the C:\ protocol is not registered".
>>
>> Does anybody know anything about this feature?
>>     
>
> Andrew, I just wanted to let you know that Cabal/cabal-install/hackage
> has a bug tracker:
>
> http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/
>
> We rely on users reporting bugs so that we know there is anything
> wrong. There is a guest account so that anyone can file tickets. There
> is a search feature to see if anyone has reported a similar problem
> previously (though we prefer getting duplicates than no reports at
> all). For bugs that really annoy you, you can add your email address
> to the 'cc list so that you get notified when the ticket is updated.
> That also counts as a "vote" for that ticket, we take that into
> account when prioritising things.
>   

I guess I just figured that since Cabal is used by hundreds of millions 
of people every single day, any little glitches I might have come across 
have already been seen by at least 1,000 people before me (and hence, 
the developers already know about it and just haven't had time to fix it 
yet).

Then again, I thought the same thing the very first time I tried Gtk2hs, 
and the Windows build was trivially broken. (I hadn't noticed it, but it 
was actually a new 2-day-old release.)

I know Windows is a rare platform for Haskell, but presumably the 
Cabal's dependency-related stuff is the same on any platform. (?) I'm 
also interested to know if the master index works on other platforms 
too. (I suppose that's really a Haddock issue rather than Cabal.) For 
that matter, I notice that Hackage seems to be using a much higher 
version number of Haddock than what I currently have installed. So maybe 
what I ought to do is go fetch the latest versions of all the tools and 
see what works. Some of the stuff I'm seeing might be fixed already.

My reason in posting here was really to see if others had similar 
experiences, and see if there are easier ways of getting things done. 
(And, for example, I now know about the root-cmd command.) Posting 
actual bug tickets requires a lot of time, energy and effort to 
determine exactly what the problem is and build a reproducible test 
case. And, like I said, I kind of assumed that all this stuff must 
already be "well known", given how popular Cabal is.