craft workaround for gentoo which allows them to generate package.conf file but not register

[bos]

(Imported from Trac #38, reported by @SyntaxPolice on 2006-01-09)

Currently, cabal can either register a package or generate a script to register the package later. Unfortunitely, gentoo would like to register the package themselves, but we don't generate a package.conf file for them.

A possible solution is to generate a package.conf file at a given location. The problem is that this breaks abstraction from ghc-pkg. Probably will do it anyway.

[bos]

(Imported comment by @dcoutts on 2006-01-09)

Yeah, that pretty much sums it up.

At the moment we use this nasty hack:

sed -i 's:ghc-pkg:/usr/bin/true:' .setup-config
./setup register || die "setup register failed"
if [[ -f .installed-pkg-config ]]; then
    do-something-with .installed-pkg-config
fi

That is we call setup register having hacked the ghc-pkg command to be /usr/bin/true. This creates the .installed-pkg-config file which we then stash away and later register it ourselves.

This is obviously relying on the implementation and not on any spec. So if we can make a proper way of getting the package conf file then that'd be great.

[bos]

(Imported comment by guest on 2006-01-09)

If we're going to do something, we should do it for the next major release

[bos]

(Imported comment by @dcoutts on 2007-05-24)

Done. setup register --gen-pkg-config=... flag added.

[bos]

(Imported comment by ross on 2007-08-04)

The interface change is not documented in the User's Guide.

[bos]

(Imported comment by @dcoutts on 2007-08-23)

Now documented.