[Haskell-cafe] How to use cabal's data-files feature and run in-place?

[Daniel Fischer]

On Friday 22 April 2011 13:57:36, Richard Cobbe wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 11:27:10PM -0500, Antoine Latter wrote:
> > 1. A side note - using the 'cabal' command line tool is easier for
> > many tasks than 'runhaskell Setup'. In particular, it does a user
> > install by default.
> 
> Interesting -- didn't know that was possible.  I didn't see that in the
> Cabal manual; section 4 gives instructions entirely in terms of
> 'runhaskell Setup'.  Am I overlooking something?
> 

On the one hand, the Cabal user's guide is a little out of date.
More importantly, there's a difference between the Cabal library and the 
'cabal' executable (which you get from the cabal-install package).
The Cabal user's guide can't assume that you have the cabal executable, but 
it can assume you have runhaskell (since without a Haskell implementation, 
installing Haskell libraries is doomed to fail anyway).
However, if the user's guide gets updated, the cabal way will probably (and 
definitely should) be added.