Cabal, System.Filepath

[Duncan Coutts]

On Thu, 2007-12-06 at 21:44 +0700, Peter Gammie wrote:
> On 06/12/2007, at 6:56 PM, Duncan Coutts wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, 2007-12-06 at 17:35 +0700, Peter Gammie wrote:
> >> Can I humbly suggest that Cabal rely on very few external libraries?
> >
> > We recently defined filepath to be a core library. As you point out
> > however this does pose a problem for older compilers. Fortunately it's
> > not that bad, you can build and install filepath using the older cabal
> > that comes with your older compiler. If that's not possible for  
> > whatever reason you can download both Cabal and filepath and:
> >
> > ghc -i../filepath --make Setup.lhs -o setup
> 
> I realise all this, I just wanted to log the fact that darcs-Cabal  
> does not build on GHC 6.6. I thought it was a design goal for Cabal to  
> compile on all GHCs back to 6.4.x (or something).

I have considered bundling filepath for exactly this reason. I'm still
undecided.

> Why is ghc-pkg looking only at globally-installed packages?

It's not ghc-pkg, it's Cabal that by default only looks at the global
packages. You can configure with --user to have it look at the user
ones. Personally I'm in favour of switching the default to --user.

Of course it cannot use user packages and then install globally, and the
current default prefix is /usr/local which is usually root only, so if
we switch the default to user installs then we'd have to switch the
default prefix. I'd prefer that too though. However it's a change that
would require general consensus.

Duncan