[Haskell-cafe] Leksah Install Issue (cabal experts please help)

[Hamish Mackenzie]

pozic raised an install issue on IRC.  Basically he was getting...

~$ cabal install leksah-server
Resolving dependencies...
cabal: Couldn't read cabal file "leksah-server/0.12.0.3/leksah-server.cabal"

To reproduce this issue.  Use GHC 6.12.3, 7.0.3 or 7.2.2 to "cabal install cabal-install" then run "cabal install leksah-server".

To work around it install GHC 7.0.4 or 7.4.1 and use it to run "cabal install cabal-install" (then you can go back to the old GHC if you want).


Cabal experts, is there a better work around than this?

The current leksah-server.cabal requires Cabal 1.10.2 or greater because it has a "test-suite" section for "cabal test".

This is fine if you have installed cabal-install with GHC 7.0.4 or 7.4.1, but if you install cabal-install with older versions of GHC (including 7.2.2) then it can't handle the file format.

I could upload a new leksah-server to hackage (with the unit tests removed), but that would not stop cabal-install from failing to read leksah-server 0.12.0.3 and bombing out (there is already a 0.12.0.4 and it is not getting to that one).

Even if you "cabal unpack" and then modify the .cabal file and run "cabal install" it still fails with the same error.

If you can think of a better solution than asking users to install GHC 7.0.4 or 7.4.1 to build cabal-install, then please let me know.