building haddock?

[Simon Marlow]

On 31 January 2006 21:38, Isaac Jones wrote:

> Duncan Coutts <duncan.coutts at worc.ox.ac.uk> writes:
> 
>> On Tue, 2006-01-31 at 13:54 +0000, Simon Marlow wrote:
>>> Duncan Coutts wrote:
>> 
>>>> We really need a field:
>>>> 
>>>> cabal-depends: 1.1.4
>>>> 
>>>> So that older versions of Cabal can say "you need version
>>>> ${cabal-depends} of Cabal to build this package".
>>> 
>>> There is such a field:
>>> 
>>>    cabal-version: >=1.1.4
>> 
>> Really! I had never seen it.
>> 
>>> but I didn't use it in Haddock (now fixed).  This field doesn't help
>>> with all the backwards compatibility issues, particularly API
>>> changes in the Cabal libraries, as we know (see previous
>>> discussions). 
>> 
>> Indeed, because by the time the cabal Setup.lhs reads the file it's
>> too late. Hence my suggestion in the previous discussions for a cabal
>> program that reads the file, decides which version of the Cabal libs
>> to use and then builds a setup program and passes control on to that.
> 
> Ahem. Cabal-install.
> 
> It doesn't read that field yet, though.

Do you intend cabal-install to be the main interface to Cabal?  That's
what Duncan was proposing (and others have suggested) - that we
deprecate the use of 'runhaskell Setup.lhs' as the interface to Cabal in
favour of a program to do the same.

Certainly there doesn't seem much point in having *both* cabal-install
and another wrapper, so clearly they should be the same thing.  I do
think this is the way to go, though.

Cheers,
	Simon