[Haskell-cafe] Cabal robustness

[Henk-Jan van Tuyl]

On Mon, 24 Mar 2014 15:40:17 +0100, Dominick Samperi <djsamperi at gmail.com>  
wrote:

> I have seen the dreaded "ExitFailure 1" many times when a package fails  
> to
> install (under Linux or Windows), and I wonder why something more helpful
> cannot be printed? Sometimes one gets a variant of this where the message
> is "this system is not compatible with this package," but the user must
> study the foo.cabal file to determine what is missing.
>
> Also, it seems that the only way to determine if a package will install  
> under
> Windows is to try and hope for the best (often getting "ExitFailure 1"  
> if it
> fails). Wouldn't it make more sense to tag packages with the OS and
> other dependencies and fail with a helpful message like "Windows not
> supported" if appropriate?

A faster way to discover if a package can be installed on Windows:
   cabal install lens-4.1 --dry-run
If the package depends on the package unix, it's not Windows compatible.  
This is of course not always sufficient, e.g. if you need to install  
non-Haskell software first.

Regards,
Henk-Jan van Tuyl


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