RE: [Visual Haskell] Experiences and some clear bugs

Hi Esa,

Thanks very much for your feedback.  We'll take note of all the issues
you raised, and try to improve things for future releases.

On 21 October 2005 09:30, Esa Ilari Vuokko wrote:

> License - if it is BSD, as announcement and documentation says,
> please make it so installer.

Yes, the next installer will have a BSD license.

> Cabal as Visual Studio project file was slightly surprising.  It
> certainly wasn't easy for me,
> but I haven't used Cabal before.  First, let me show how I would, in
> case I could use
> Visual Haskell at work for commercial purposes, have files set up.
> +work-space
> -+repo
> --+etc
> ----+visual-studio-solution-folder
> --+lib
> ---+my-haskell-lib
> -+build
> -+bin
> I hope ascii "graphics" are not totally screwed up.  There are few
> things that simply don't
> sit with Cabal or Visual Haskell.  First, my solution and project
> files are in diffrent directory
> than my sources.  Now, specifying this into Visual Haskell required
> text editing Cabal-file,
> but having ../../../lib/my-haskell-lib in there wasn't visually too
> pleasing, and it crashed
> Visual Haskell and this time it took IDE down.  After that I stopped
> trying to work around,
> because I was comfortable enough to compile from command line and
> using IDE only as editor.

I believe this *should* be possible.  We'll look into the crash you
reported, though.

> It also seems that I cannot specify Cabal option -v to debug problems,
> but I didn't look too
> hard.  I also find that I'd rather have list of exported modules in
> settings properties than
> in module/sourcefile properties

I'm agnostic on this issue, we'll see what Krasimir thinks.

> It might also be nice that Haskell projects also had Debug/Release
> builds, even if they were exactly the same.

Yes, we plan to do this.

> I am not sure at all how to invoke current
> Visual Haskell projects from command line build.

The Visual Haskell projects are just Cabal packages, you can follow the
Cabal instructions for building and installing them (hmmm, we should
really have the Cabal documentation in Visual Haskell too).  Basically,
you do this:

  > runghc Setup.lhs configure
  > runghc Setup.lhs build
  > runghc Setup.lhs install

but make sure that Visual Haskell's versions of runghc and ghc are in
your PATH.

> Sorry for rather lengthy mail.  Also, if I can somehow help or provide
> more info..just
> send me an email.  I am subscribed to the list, but I might not read
> it always. 

No problem, many thanks for the feedback.  It's great to hear that the
problems you're having are not of the completely trivial kind, and you
are actually managing to get some work done using Visual Haskell.

Cheers,
        Simon