[Haskell-cafe] non-hackage cabal repos? unpacking non-repo package tarballs?

[Rogan Creswick]

On Tue, Nov 2, 2010 at 11:02 AM, Claus Reinke <claus.reinke at talk21.com> wrote:
> I often find myself writing example code that I'd like
> to distribute via cabal, but without further burdening
> hackage with not generally useful packages.
>
> 1. The simplest approach would be if cabal could expose
> its internal 'unpackPackage' as a command, so that
>
>   author: cabal sdist
>   user: cabal unpackPackage Example.tar.gz

This is possible with cabal-dev (http://goo.gl/RkLGx), but it's
somewhat of an accidental feature, so it's not quite as simple as your
ideal:

Author:
$ cabal sdist

The user's side of things changes a bit depending on what the package
is.  If it's an executable, this works:

User:
$ cabal-dev add-source Example.tar.gz
$ cabal-dev install Example
$ ./cabal-dev/bin/example-program

If you're distributing a binary, then the add-source is really all it
takes, if you're happy using cabal-dev for the whole build. It will
create a local sandbox with the new library, and subsequent cabal-dev
commands can use that sandbox for all non-global packages.

--Rogan

> would work (the point being that cabal handles .tar.gz,
> which not all users have installed separately; distributing
> the .tar.gz would be handled via the usual channels; and
> after unpacking, cabal can build the source package).
>
> Note that 'cabal unpack' does not seem helpful here, as it touches the
> package index instead of just looking at the tarball.
>
> Could this be made possible, please? Or is it already?
>
> 2. Failing that, I remembered that cabal used to be designed
> without a fixed package repo address, and a little digging
> found options --remote-repo and --local-repo, as well as
> the directory layout for package repositories:
>
> http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/wiki/HackageDB
>
> So this scenario seems possible, in principle:
>
>   author: expose a package repo http://myrepo
>   user: cabal --remote-repo=http://myrepo fetch Example
>
> Is it possible to add a (temporary) repo location like this, especially for
> 'cabal fetch'/'cabal unpack'? I've managed to get 'cabal --local-repo=myrepo
> list Example' to work (needs uncompressed 00-index.tar), but not the remote
> variant, and fetching from the local repo doesn't work,
> either.
>
> Are there any usage examples of these features?
>
> Claus
>
> _______________________________________________
> Haskell-Cafe mailing list
> Haskell-Cafe at haskell.org
> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
>