[Haskell-cafe] cabal, Setup.lhs example

[Magnus Therning]

On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 11:52, Ross Paterson <ross at soi.city.ac.uk> wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 11:31:21AM +0100, Magnus Therning wrote:
>> On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 10:59, Ross Paterson <ross at soi.city.ac.uk> wrote:
>> > Magnus is building by directly running the Setup.hs himself, which ignores
>> > the Build-Type.  To get cabal-install to use his Setup.hs, the Build-Type
>> > must be set to Custom.
>>
>> Oh, why*2?
>>
>> Why is the header there if it's not used by Cabal, and why does cabal care?
>
> The field allows cabal to avoid compiling the Setup.hs in this case.
> It might also be used by other tools, e.g. one might only trust Simple
> packages.  Not all fields are used by all tools, and several of them
> do not affect the operation of the library (e.g. Home-page).

All right, so why would cabal want to avoid compiling the Setup.hs?

Of course this behaviour of cabal's means that I in the future will use *Custom*
all the time, since I otherwise have to remember this surprising feature of a
tool I never use.  Is there any reason *not* to do this?

Cheers,
M

-- 
Magnus Therning                        (OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4)
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