patch applied (packages/regex-base): Make setup script compileagain after recent Cabal changes

Sven Panne sven.panne at aedion.de
Tue Sep 4 13:50:24 EDT 2007


On Tuesday 04 September 2007 19:24, Duncan Coutts wrote:
> Well, if the library you're binding to happens to be one of the 350+
> that use pkg-config then cabal can indeed find the paths to the headers
> and the varying linker options (by asking pkg-config).
>
> pkgconfig-depends: gtk+-2.0 >= 2.8, cairo
>
> This is a new feature in Cabal-1.2.
>
> Of course it doesn't help for libs like GL that don't provide pkg-config
> files.

I once tried to use pkg-config, but it was a total desaster: It suffers from 
versionitis itself, various distros put various (sometimes wrong) things into 
the package configuration files, dynamic vs. static linking dependencies are 
usually totally broken, it is not available on Windows (Mac OS X?) etc.  In 
general, I think that pkg-config is a nice idea, but typically poorly 
maintained. (Anyone remembers problems with xmkmf? ;-)

> > if the installed OpenAL's alcCloseDevice returns void or an int,
>
> That's trickier.
>
> > the matching Haskell type for an ALuint, etc.
>
> c2hs can do that.

Hmmm, just another build-time dependency...

Note that I don't claim that autotools are perfect or beautiful, but I haven't 
seen something substantially better yet. (Yes, I know scons, cmake, ...)

Cheers,
   S.


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