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Contributing to Cabal

If you want to hack on Cabal, don't be intimidated!

Of particular value are the open issues list and the cabal-devel mailing list, which is a good place to ask questions.

Building Cabal from git cloned sources and running the tests

The steps below will make use of sandboxes for building. The process might be somewhat different when you do not want to use sandboxes.

Building Cabal from from source requires the following:

  • Glorious/Glasgow Haskell Compiler (ghc).

  • An existing (relatively recent) cabal binary (e.g. obtained as part of the Haskell Platform, bootstrapped from the source tarball on Hackage or installed from your Linux vendor).

  • The sources. For example, you might want to

    cd ~/MyHaskellCode
git clone https://github.com/haskell/cabal.git
cd cabal

    to download the git repository to ~/MyHaskellCode/cabal.

To build and test the Cabal library, do:

  1. Move to Cabal directory:

    cd Cabal

  2. Create a sandbox, and fill it with the necessary dependencies:

    cabal sandbox init
cabal install --only-dependencies --enable-tests

  3. Unfortunately, because of way the bootstrapping works for cabal, we cannot use cabal for the next steps; we need to use Setup instead. So, compile Setup.hs:

    ghc --make -threaded Setup.hs

  4. However, we do want to use the sandbox package database that was created by cabal. We need its path later, so we have to find out where it is, for example with:

    cabal exec -- sh -c "echo \$GHC_PACKAGE_PATH" | sed 's/:.*//'

    the result should be something like

    ~/MyHaskellCode/cabal/Cabal/.cabal-sandbox/$SOMESTUFF-packages.conf.d

    (or, as a relative path with my setup:)

    .cabal-sandbox/x86_64-linux-ghc-7.8.4-packages.conf.d

    We will refer to this as PACKAGEDB.

  5. Configure and build Cabal, and run all tests:

    ./Setup configure --enable-tests --package-db=$PACKAGEDB
./Setup build
./Setup test

The steps for building and testing the cabal-install executable are almost identical; only the first two steps are different:

  1. Move to the cabal-install directory:

    cd cabal-install

  2. Create a sandbox, and fill it with the necessary dependencies. For this, we need to add the Cabal library from the repository as an add-source dependency:

    cabal sandbox init
cabal sandbox add-source ../Cabal/
cabal install --only-dependencies --enable-tests

(In addition, the absolute sandbox path will be slightly different because we have to use the cabal-install sandbox, not the Cabal one. If you use the relative path, you are set.)

Dependencies policy

Cabal's policy is to support being built by versions of GHC that are up to 3 years old.

The Cabal library must be buildable out-of-the-box, i.e., the dependency versions required by Cabal must have shipped with GHC for at least 3 years. Cabal may use newer libraries if they are available, as long as there is a suitable fallback when only older versions exist.

cabal-install must be buildable by versions of GHC that are up to 3 years old. It need not be buildable out-of-the-box, so cabal-install may depend on newer versions of libraries if they can still be compiled by 3-year-old versions of GHC.