[Haskell-cafe] Compiler constraints in cabal

[Henning Thielemann]

wren ng thornton schrieb:
> On 11/6/10 6:20 AM, Reiner Pope wrote:
>> I was aware of this condition, but I'm not precisely sure it addresses
>> my requirements. When you run "cabal install some-package", cabal
>> reads all version constraints listed in the "build-depends" field, and
>> chooses which versions of which packages to download from Hackage in
>> order to satisfy these constraints.
>>
>> I want to expose my dependency on a particular version of ghc to
>> cabal's constraint satisfier. The end result I want is that when you
>> type "cabal install hmatrix-static" with ghc-6.12 installed, then
>> cabal chooses hmatrix-static-0.3; and when you type "cabal install
>> hmatrix-static" with ghc-7.0 installed, then cabal chooses
>> hmatrix-static-0.4.
> 
> 
> Clients of hmatrix-static would have to say
> 
>     if impl(ghc >= 7.0)
>         Build-Depends: hmatrix-static == 0.4.*
>     else
>         Build-Depends: hmatrix-static == 0.3.*
> 
> in order to pull in the right dependency for themselves.

Awful - I would not like to complicate my Cabal files this way. This is
like copying the Build-Depends enumeration to all depending packages.

> In order to get the behavior you're after, though, is trickier business.
> Since every version of GHC ships with a different version of base,
> you'll have to make use of that knowledge such that users of ghc-7.0
> with base-5 will get hmatrix-static-0.4 whereas users of ghc-6.12 with
> base-4 will get hmatrix-static-0.3

I would not like this solution, too, since this assumes, that 'base' is
a GHC-specific library and I hope this will be no longer true in the future.

Does the LanguageExtensions field prevent building a package, if the
installed compiler cannot handle that? I'm afraid, LanguageExtensions is
just a list of flags that is passed to GHC. But it sounds like a good
idea, if Cabal would also check, whether the used compiler supports the
required LanguageExtensions at all.