Cabal and external dependencies

[Henning Thielemann]

On Tue, 8 Jul 2008, Jim Burton wrote:

> Is cabal capable of detecting missing external deps, e.g. for packages
> that provide bindings? Does this depend
> on package authors and some use of a config script seperate to .cabal?
> I'm just curious because I ran into this just now -- I tried to
> install dons' hackage-sparklines with cabal-install today (whilst reading
> his blog post about the same) which failed, in a way that seemed
> cryptic at first. I needed to notice that it was gd which failed and
> guess that I should install the libgd dev files. It's obvious
> that I would need these, you might say, but it certainly has the
> potential to confuse people...

http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ticket/262