ANN: Cabal 0.5 (GHC 6.4 release candidate)

[Jens Petersen]

Isaac Jones wrote:
> Jens Petersen <petersen at haskell.org> writes:
> 
>>Isaac Jones wrote:
>>
>>It would be nice if cabal allowed more choice or configuration
>>of install directories IMHO: in particular libdir comes to
>>mind.  
> 
> Do you mean more control over where the libraries themselves end up?
> Of course, you can use --prefix during configure, but then cabal will
> still put things under that prefix in a pre-determined place.  You're
> asking for control over exactly where the libraries go?

Yes, as in whether install dir is made under /usr/lib or
/usr/lib/ghc-<version>/ or whatever.  So really this is a
request for a "--libdir" option to setup?  In some cases
--prefix may be sufficient, but not if there is both
an executable and libraries in a package for example.

>>Also it would be nice if the default was multilib aware (eg for
>>Fedora on x86_64 libdir is "/usr/lib64").
> 
> I don't quite understand.  This is for systems where you might have
> mixed 32 and 64 bit binaries?  You want cabal to detect this situation
> and compile two binaries, or you would just like it to detect the
> default libraries location on that target?

Well I'm not sure yet what the best solution is.  However I mean if
we're building libs with ghc.x86_64 say then they should be installed
under say /usr/lib64.  Well it may be too much to ask that cabal
gets this completely right at this stage, but at least the "--libdir"
option mentioned above would help packagers.

>>Personally I would like to see ghc libraries at least installed
>>under ghc's libdir since their ABI depends on the version of ghc
>>they are built with, ie typically under $libdir/ghc-$ghc_version/
>>rather than $libdir.
> 
> You mean by default, without using the --prefix flag?  That seems
> pretty reasonable.

Yep.  Actually if this were the default, I probably wouldn't
need --libdir much at all. :-)

Jens