Cabal cheers and some feature requests

[Duncan Coutts]

On Wed, 2008-07-02 at 17:02 +0200, Benjamin Franksen wrote:
> First: Three big cheers to Duncan for his excellent work on cabal,
> especially the new cabal-install.

Thanks :-). There are lots of other contributors of course, not just me.

Remember the best place for feature requests is in the hackage trac:

http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/

commenting on a ticket and adding yourself to the 'cc' list counts as a
vote for the ticket. It really helps us to prioritise development work.

> One feature I think would be uncontroversial is for cabal install to try to
> build haddock API docs and hscolour'ed sources. Momentarily, I still have
> to download (or darcs get) the package, unpack and cd into it, and then do
> 
> cabal configure
> cabal hscolour
> cabal haddock
> cabal install --prefix=my_prefix
> 
> to have the docs installed, too.
> 
> Maybe add switches --with-haddock and --with-hscolour to cabal install
> command?

http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ticket/206

Currently the #1 most commonly requested feature.

Please comment on the ticket. It's not clear exactly how this feature
should work, ie how to specify the flags. Implementing this should be
trivial once we've agreed how the interaction will work.

> (BTW: what is the trick to get the "source" links into the haddock docs? I
> remember there was one package I installed where this worked out of the box
> but I can't find it at the moment.)

See $ cabal haddock --help

    --hyperlink-source  Hyperlink the documentation to the source code 
                        (using HsColour)

> Another wish on my list is to be able to set defaults for cabal options in
> my $(HOME)/.cabal/config.

Currently you can do this for a subset of the flags (like prefix,
profiling) and we do intend to extend it to the full set.

http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ticket/223


Duncan