cabal fails with Custom Setup.hs

[joeyh]

Trying to build packages that use a Custom Setup.hs with the cabal wrapper will fail. It seems cabal doesn't really understand cross-compiling, so it builds the Setup.hs with the android ghc, and then tries to run it.

I don't know of a fix at this time. May need cabal changes. I was able to work around it in one case by setting Build-Type: Simple in the cabal file. That package only used the cistom Setup.hs to do some haddock stuff.

[neurocyte]

In the long run Cabal definitely needs proper cross compile support. There was some discussion on the mailing list awhile ago about it, but I don’t think anyone is actively working on it right now.

[joeyh]

The trick described above works for most problem packages. One challanging one is network, which uses a configure script. I just got it to build, via this very hacky method:

cabal unpack network
copy in config.sub and config.guess from automake 1.13.1
edit the configure script, and add to the top of it: set -- --host=arm-linux-androideabi

Then the cabal wrapper can be used to install it. Although I had several build failure due to, apparently, it wanting to build in IPV6 socket support, which seemed to use symbols not available to ghc-android. It was easy enough to edit the files where this occurred and ifdef that stuff out.