[Haskell-cafe] GitIt

[Judah Jacobson]

Two possible fixes come to mind:

1) In the .cabal file for cautious-file, it says:

Flag posix
    description: Use POSIX-specific features
    default: True

You can use "cabal install -fposix cautious-file" to explicitly turn
on POSIX support, and "cabal install -f-posix cautious-file" to
explicitly turn it off.  (From above, the default is the former.)

So you can probably get this working with:
cabal install cautious-file -f-posix; cabal install gitit

Incidentally, it would be better for the .cabal file to detect that
automatically with "if os(windows)", as e.g. Haskeline does.


2) If you have a local, edited installation of a package with the same
version number as the one on Hackage, then it seems to confuse "cabal
install".  (This may be a bug; I'm not sure.)  Workaround is to bump
the version in your local installation, e.g. from 0.1.5 to
0.1.5.0.0.0.1.; then "cabal install" won't try to rebuild it.

Hope that helps,
-Judah

On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 12:20 PM, Andrew Coppin
<andrewcoppin at btinternet.com> wrote:
> The other day, I did a slightly foolish thing. I uttered the command
>
>  cabal install gitit
>
> Actually, while I was "foolish", it actually worked better than you'd think.
> It wanted to install several thousand billion packages, but all of them
> compiled without issue.
>
> Well, all except one. You see, for reasons that I have yet to determine,
> cabal is *convinced* that gitit transitively requires the "unix" package.
> Astonishingly, this doesn't work on Windows. :-P
>
> Question: Why does 90% of the network-related stuff on Hackage require the
> unix package? What's in there that's so network-related? I don't understand.
> We've *got* a portable "network" package that works on all platforms, so...?
>
> Anyway, on further investigation, it appears that the culprit is
> "cautious-file". If a certain CPP flag it set, "unix" gets added to the
> Build-Depends: field. Except... I didn't set any CPP flags! What the hell?
>
> So I manually edit the package description (!), and now it builds and
> installs perfectly happily. So now I tell cabal to install gitit again...
> and it immediately tries to install unix, even though the only package that
> (it thinks) requires unix is already installed? Wuh?
>
> So I unpack gitit and tell cabal to build it. Building takes about 30
> seconds. *Linking* takes about 4 minutes (??!) And then it fails due to some
> missing symbols. (No, I don't remember off the top of my head what they
> were.)
>
> At this point, I am completely lost. Does anybody have any ideas on how I
> can make GitIt work, short of installing Linux? I've searched and searched
> and I can't see a pre-built binary anywhere.
>
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