cabal install doesn't use PATH

[Frederik Eaton]

Hi,

What's the reason for not resolving executables through PATH in the
cabal Makefile?

$ pwd
/home/frederik/cabal-1.1.4
$ which ghc      
/home/frederik/arch/i386/bin/ghc
$ make install   
mkdir -p dist/tmp
/usr/bin/ghc --make -Wall -fno-warn-unused-matches -cpp -i. -odir dist/tmp -hidir dist/tmp Setup.lhs -o setup
make: /usr/bin/ghc: Command not found
make: *** [setup] Error 127

If I want to specify a different version of GHC than the one I
normally use, then I could do:

$ PATH=special-version-dir:$PATH make install

Why the cabal makefile has to introduce a new variable HCBASE to
achieve this functionality, I don't understand. It makes the normal
user's life much harder by breaking a standard Unix abstraction layer;
and at the same time it barely makes anyone else's life any easier.

Also, I think it is more standard to use PREFIX to refer to what
appears as PREF in the makefile.

Frederik

-- 
http://ofb.net/~frederik/