[jhc] How to compile new libraries from Hackage?

[John Meacham]

On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 09:17:17AM +1000, Mark Wotton wrote:
> so I'm feeling a bit lost and lonely outside the comforting embrace of  
> cabal-install.
> I've read some of the discussions on this list, and I understand that  
> it's not very practical to try to support Cabal as is, but what's the  
> alternative method to compile libraries from Hackage? Where do the  
> libraries go so jhc can find them? Is there a convention of some kind?

The most straightforward way right now is to just write your own
'.cabal' file that jhc will accept for the package. like the
containers.cabal and applicative.cabal that I distribute in the lib/
directory. Basically you just need to strip out the Build-Depends and
replace them with the appropriate ones for jhc. 

I am thinking of changing the .cabal files that jhc accepts to be true
YAML files, not only because it is always good to follow an external
standard but it would help avoid confusion with actual cabal files as
the formats have diverged.

An automated tool to convert cabal -> jhc.yaml files would be useful
then.

        John

-- 
John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈ - http://notanumber.net/