Re: hgettext still having strange incompatibilities to cabal install
(This is a resend of a message I accidentally sent directly to Joachim instead of the list)
> Am 27.12.2014 um 18:10 schrieb Joachim Breitner <nomeata@debian.org>:
>
> Hi,
>
> Am Samstag, den 27.12.2014, 15:46 +0100 schrieb Sven Bartscher:
>> Quite a while ago we added a build-dependency for libghc-cabal-dev to
>> hgettext to assure that it uses the same cabal library as cabal
>> install. However, all builds I looked at (the ones in jessie, sid and
>> experimental) have a runtime dependency on the ghc version of cabal and
>> cabal install again has problems with the Setup.hs files, which contain
>> hgettext functions.
>>
>> My guess is that hgettext is build against the older version, even
>> though the newer is available. Does anyone know what we can do about
>> this?
>
> thanks for looking at this issue; it completely dropped off my screen.
>
> What are the symptoms of this again? Does it affect jessie? Is this
> release critical?
The symptoms are, that if you try to build some package that uses hgettext functions in its Setup.hs, cabal yells at you that a lot of arguments aren’t known. This happens because, cabal install passes arguments to Setup.hs and if Setup.hs has another library version it is likely that the command line interfaces don’t match and Setup.hs refuses the arguments.
Running runghc Setup.hs <command> still works, but that lacks many features cabal has. So there is no way to compile packages depending on hgettext and having the comfort of cabal.
All in all I would treat this as release critical.
> If we need to make sure that hgettext ist build against the newer
> version, we should patch it’s .cabal file.
Then we had to patch the .cabal files of all packages that provide Setup.hs functions* every time we update cabal. So I don’t know if that is really the way to go. Do you know if it’s possible to alter the dependencies of a package through the cabal command line? If so, we could mark the affected packages and teach the devscripts to compile them with the right version. If not, devscripts could patch the .cabal file just before compiling, but that imposes the risk of breaking the compilation by some broken regex.
* Functions for use in Setup.hs
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