finding the dependecies of cabal packages

[ross at soi.city.ac.uk]

On Thu, Jul 28, 2005 at 11:53:23AM +1000, Bernard Pope wrote:
> I've been using autoconf and automake for buddha, which though ugly at
> times, provides a nice path to making packages for various unixy systems
> (generally I think because this is the standard GNU way of doing
> things).
> 
> However, I haven't been able to migrate this over to cabal. One thing
> that is not clear in my mind is where cabal ends and autotools begin.
> There seems to be some overlap. Personally, I would love to throw away
> all the autotools stuff, but I'm not sure if I can easily replicate
> everything in cabal alone.
> 
> Is it a goal of cabal to be able to avoid autotools?

Avoiding Makefiles is certainly a goal.

If you're interfacing to C, autoconf is a convenient bundle of fiddly
special cases and knowledge about lots of systems.  It seems pointless
to replicate that.

But if it's just Haskell, finding all the Haskell tools and using those
to build executables and libraries, Cabal should do that by itself.
There's currently no way to specify constraints on versions of the
tools, though.