Cabal Release Candidate

[Simon Marlow]

On 18 July 2005 05:55, Isaac Jones wrote:

> Brian Smith <brianlsmith at gmail.com> writes:
>> In particular, can we just skip support for GHC 6.4? The
>> installation instructions for GHC 6.4 are workable, but it looks
>> like the GHC 6.4.1 experience will be much better. Plus, I think
>> that the package management changes between GHC 6.4.0 and 6.4.1 will
>> cause problems for people packaging their stuff using Cabal. So,
>> could we just say that Cabal 1.2 requires GHC 6.2.2 or GHC 6.4.1 or
>> later?
> 
> I do indeed think that the next version of GHC will be better for
> installing packages, but I don't think we should give up on 6.4.
> OTOH, I don't think that it's a huge deal to just document the
> difficulties.  It's really no harder than removing the old Cabal
> before installing the new one.  Maybe we should just force everyone to
> do that, or make that the default behavior for "make install".
> That'll probably offend some folks' sensibilities.  What do folks here
> think?

It's a tough one.  Skipping 6.4 is somewhat attractive, because there
are some serious problems with upgrading Cabal on GHC 6.4.  However, if
we put appropriate warnings into the Cabal README and describe what the
problems are, I think that's enough.

I also need to check whether GHC can still be built if Cabal has been
upgraded.

>> * It should be possible for Windows users to build Cabal 1.1.1 on
>> both GHC 6.2.2 and GHC 6.4.1 without having GNU make installed. This
>> process needs to be documented. I will wait to send you the docs
>> until I find out if GHC 6.4(.0) will be supported in Cabal 1.2.
> 
> Yes, I would like to support it.  The only extra steps are those in
> the "make setup" command, which is just a couple of extra flags to GHC
> for bootstrapping.  A batch file / shell script would actually work
> just as well. The GNUMakefile is really just a glorified shell script.

With 6.4+, I hope you can use "runghc Setup.lhs".  With 6.2.2, typing
some GHC commands manually is probably required (perhaps we could
include a .bat file?).

Cheers,
	Simon