advance warning of Cabal-1.6.0.2 and package breakages

[Duncan Coutts]

On Wed, 2009-02-18 at 08:54 -0800, Patrick Perry wrote:
> Thanks for the heads-up, Duncan. For the BLAS package, the situation 
> is slightly complicated, and I will still be sticking with autoconf 
> for now. The reasons are twofold:

Sorry, I was not actually suggesting that your blas package can drop its
configure script yet. The only suggestion that applied to your packages
(glas and gsl-random) was:

> > More advice:
> >
> >      * Don't make configure set buildable: False. Just fail.

I should have made that clearer when I added you to the cc list.

The reason behind this advice is that it pinpoints the location and
cause of failure more precisely. If the configure script discovers the
prerequisites are not met it should print a helpful error and fail there
and then.

> For me to switch to git rid of autoconf, I would need Cabal to provide  
> the following:
> 
> 1. A way to find out the C calling convention for Fortran functions.
> 2. A way to check if a specific function exists in a library.
> 3. An option to try a different library name if a check for a library  
> fails.

I think we'll be able to do 3. automatically in the future. For 2. we
should probably supply a library function that Setup.hs scripts can use.
As for 1. that probably just needs a custom test in the Setup.hs.

Don't worry about it for now though.

Duncan