id,summary,reporter,owner,description,type,status,priority,milestone,component,version,severity,resolution,keywords,cc,difficulty,ghcversion,platform
225,"allow installing just specific bits, like just docs",duncan,,"
Sometimes people would like to build and install just part of a cabal project, e.g. the documentation or one of the libraries or binaries. Specific use-cases are packaging for OS distro's and generating Haddock docs for code that was installed without it (cf the current state of Debian-stable).

Igloo proposes the following user interface:

-----

As long as docs, license and binaries can be (de)selected individually I don't really mind.

If you want a concrete suggestion, we could have `--foo` and `--no-foo` for each thing, with the default being `--all` and the command line being processed left-to-right, e.g.

{{{
cabal install --no-haddock-interfaces --docs --no-html
}}}

would install

 * all (which wouldn't actually contain anything)
 * docs (which wouldn't actually contain anything)
 * haddock-interfaces
 * license
 * everything under binaries

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I broadly agree, but am slightly concerned there are dependencies amongst the various things that his syntax does not respect (e.g. one may need to install the libraries - e.g. one depending on a foreign library - in order to get a binary working). So either we have to vet the command lines or coarsen the flags. I hope Duncan and Igloo can draw on their packaging experience and determine what is actually useful.",enhancement,new,normal,Cabal-1.8,Cabal library,1.2.3.0,normal,,,peteg42@… avatar@… bos@…,normal,6.8.2,