zlib and dependencies in general

[Iain Barnett]

2009/6/30 Don Stewart <dons at galois.com>

>
> The cabal file lists zlib as a dependency:
>
>        extra-libraries: z
>
> however, what 'z' means varies from distro to distro. Ultimately, your
> package manager has to solve this.
>
> -- Don
>

Thanks for the reply, but I see two problems with this

1. cabal-install depends on zlib, so the .cabal file is not a help in this
case.

2. Even if I did know that cabal-install was the usual package manager (saw
one person today on Haskell Cafe that didn't) and thought to look in the
.cabal file, then  "extra-libraries: z" still wouldn't have helped me, as a
human, know to install zlibc, zlib1g and zlib1g-dev.

3) one for luck, Debian doesn't have a package for cabal-install or the
haskell zlib library, so it can't solve this for me either. Unless it can
use .cabal files, and why would I know this and what would the commands be?

I had to completely remove Cabal and GHC and then spend 2 days resolving
dependencies to get it working with the latest versions on OSX Tiger as
well, so it's not as if this is a one off problem, unless I'm the problem.
Therefore I think some human readable text on Hackage would be helpful.

Iain
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