[Haskell-cafe] ANN: cabal-dev 0.8

[Rogan Creswick]

We're happy to announce the release of cabal-dev 0.8! This version is
available on hackage now, and contains many bug fixes and improvements,
as outlined in the full release notes below.

--Rogan


cabal-dev release 0.8
==================================================

The 0.8 release of `cabal-dev` fixes many of the bugs that have been
reported by `cabal-dev` users. It also provides more flexible, easier
configuration and improves tool support for working within the
`cabal-dev` sandbox (ghc-pkg suport and better ghci support). Upgrading
is recommended for all users.

Please report any bugs or submit enhancement requests to
<https://github.com/creswick/cabal-dev/issues>.

Much of the work on this release (and previous releases) of
`cabal-dev` was funded by Galois, Inc. <http://www.galois.com/>

About cabal-dev
==================================================

`cabal-dev` is a Haskell build tool that augments Cabal and
cabal-install to make it convenient to work with a sandboxed set of
packages. It limits the effect of your build on unrelated parts of
your system. Among other things, `cabal-dev` satisfies the following
needs:

* Avoid conflicts between libraries by working only with the set of
  packages that are needed for the current project.

* Enable depending on a patched dependency without that patched
  dependency accidentally being used by another project's build.

* Enable the simultaneous development of multiple interdependent
  packages without the development versions leaking to other project
  build environments.

Significant effort has been made to ensure that `cabal-dev` works across
platforms (Mac, Windows, and Linux) and with the versions of GHC that
are most commonly in use (6.10-7.0).

What's new
==================================================

Details can be found on github at
<https://github.com/creswick/cabal-dev>.

Bugs fixed:

* `cabal-dev` no longer passes `--verbose` to cabal-install commands that
  do not accept it. <https://github.com/creswick/cabal-dev/issues/18>

* `cabal-dev` now recognizes and passes through short flags to
  cabal-install. In particular, this bug frequently came up when
  attempting to pass a flag (`-f`) to `cabal-dev install`.
  <https://github.com/creswick/cabal-dev/issues/6>

* `cabal-dev` now supports all cabal-install commands, including
  `test`. <https://github.com/creswick/cabal-dev/issues/10>

* We also made changes that should address inconsistencies with the
  remote repository (Hackage) cache location, but those issues remain
  open until we have confirmation from end users (you!) that these
  changes actually fix those issues.
  <https://github.com/creswick/cabal-dev/issues/15> and
  <https://github.com/creswick/cabal-dev/issues/14>

Enhancements and new features:

* `cabal-dev ghci` now invokes ghci with the exact same set of flags
  that would be used in a cabal-install build (using a trick copied
  from Leksah). This means that it will now have the appropriate
  package visibility, language settings, and source directories set
  when it is invoked.

  Note that in order for `cabal-dev ghci` to work, all dependencies
  must already be installed in the sandbox, and the package must
  already be configured.

* `cabal-dev buildopts` will print the set of build options that would
  be passed to GHC when invoking `cabal build`. You can then use these
  flags for other tools that invoke GHC (e.g. the doctest package
  <http://hackage.haskell.org/package/doctest>).

* `cabal-dev ghc-pkg` will invoke `ghc-pkg` with the appropriate flags
  to examine or alter the package database inside the `cabal-dev`
  sandbox.

* `cabal-dev` now has more flexible support for cabal-install
  configuration:

  * By default `cabal-dev` will now use any settings from your
    cabal-install configuration file, except those that must be
    overridden in order to sandbox the build. This makes it more
    convenient to e.g. use an alternate remote repository with
    `cabal-dev`.

  * `cabal-dev` now supports merging of additional cabal-install
    configuration settings, to make it easy to work with multiple
    cabal-install configurations (`--extra-config-file=...`).

* `cabal-dev` now has a flag to pass explicit options to cabal-install
  in case there are any conflicts between `cabal-dev` flags
  (`--cabal-install-arg`).

* `cabal-dev` now has a flag to specify a particular cabal-install
  executable to use (`--with-cabal-install=...`).

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