[Haskell-cafe] writing a good Setup.hs is *hard* (was: broken on install encoding 0.6.6)

[Rogan Creswick]

On Wed, Aug 17, 2011 at 6:29 AM, Gang <yugang.bj at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> sorry to bother
>

Not in the least!

I was trying to figure out what problem you were encountering, and I
learned a lot.  I never did recreate your problem, but in the process
I ran into a whole host of other annoyances and strange situations
relating to slightly broken cabal files and cabal build intricacies
that confound our existing tools.

I don't mean to pick on encoding or HaXml - I've seen the same kinds
of issues in many, many Haskell packages (including most of the
packages I've written myself) these are just the ones I ran into
today. (and I am quite serious when I say that writing a good Setup.hs
is very, very, difficult).  My objective is just to motivate a minor
change to cabal that would help to make this easier.

On to the build problems:

encoding-0.6.6 uses it's own source during the build process! It
actually has to be partially compiled before the build tool can build
encoding (!).  I'm *amazed* that this actually works at all
(impressed, too), and indeed, it doesn't work with cabal-dev, which is
unfortunate: cabal-dev would have identified one of the dependency
issues in HaXml 1.19 (pretty is an undocumented dependency, although I
am unsure if that was true at the time 1.19 and encoding-0.6.6 were
released.  I haven't tracked the pretty dependency down to the exact
source - it could be a transitive dep introduced by a recent version
of something HaXml 1.19 needs.  Per my subject line - this is
amazingly difficult - keep in mind that we're not talking about
building *packages*, this is just to build the *build tool*, and none
of this is documented.  How long before it is effectively impossible
to recreate the circumstances that result in a successful
encoding-0.6.6 build?).

cabal-dev can't build encoding-0.6.6 because the encoding source that
is referenced from encoding's Setup.hs depends on (at least) HaXml >=
1.19 && < 1.22.5; this is OK with cabal, since cabal-install installs
a necessary HaXml into your user package db prior to building
encoding's Setup.hs (modulo the missing upper version bound).
Therefore HaXml "just happens" to be visible when cabal builds
Setup.hs -- a build step that cabal-dev isn't capable of controlling
(and probably never will be -- we could intercept system calls, but
that's difficult when only supporting one OS, much less three).

You can, of course, manually install HaXml to your local package db
and then cabal-dev install encodings, but that's somewhat of a hack
(and you'll find that the current HaXml won't work for the current
encodings release, as Gang Yu did).

Adding a section to the cabal file that specifies build dependencies
for Setup.hs would make some very important parts of this process
obvious - and it would *greatly* assist in debugging failing builds,
not to mention allowing us to make use of the extensive libraries on
hackage to write more expressive build systems.  (We could actually
use openshake in Setup.hs, once it's released, for example!)

I've floated the idea past a number of Haskell programmers with
positive responses, and there is a GSOC ticket that provides some more
details (the project was not selected - no students proposed to work
on it):

http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/summer-of-code/ticket/1602

--Rogan

> Regards
> Gang
> On 08/17/2011 04:59 PM, Gang Yu wrote:
>
> hi, cafe:
>
>     I go through to the encoding package installation problem again.
>
>  cabal install encoding
> Resolving dependencies...
> /tmp/encoding-0.6.68093/encoding-0.6.6/dist/setup/setup: 4: Syntax error:
> ";" unexpected
>
> when I have a check on the this issue, I get:
>
> file
> ~/.cabal/packages/hackage.haskell.org/encoding/0.6.6/encoding-0.6.6/dist/setup/setup
> /home/gang/.cabal/packages/hackage.haskell.org/encoding/0.6.6/encoding-0.6.6/dist/setup/setup:
> ELF 64-bit LSB executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked
> (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.27, not stripped
>
> My machine is:
>
> gang at gang-laptop:~$ uname -a
> Linux gang-laptop 2.6.38-8-generic #42-Ubuntu SMP Mon Apr 11 03:31:50 UTC
> 2011 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
>
> is this related? How can I manually install the package from scratch? Any
> helps or directs will be appreciated
>
> Thanks
> Gang
>
>
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