id	summary	reporter	owner	description	type	status	priority	milestone	component	version	severity	resolution	keywords	cc	difficulty	ghcversion	platform
475	don't describe build actions that are no-ops	duncan		"from http://trevion.blogspot.com/2008/11/cabal-is-fine-piece-of-software.html

This is actually an excellent review. It's funny and spot on. It picks up some of the real things that people notice but that Cabal hackers are blind to because we're too used to the way things are.

One thing it picks up on:

{{{
Preprocessing executables for interpreter-0.1...
Building interpreter-0.1..
}}}

The commentator notes
{{{
This actually illustrates a couple of nice things. First, I
really like the message about preprocessing executables. I
haven’t said anything about preprocessors in my Cabal
metadata file, but Cabal is helping me to realize that
perhaps I could have. Or perhaps it’s telling me that it has
to do some preprocessing as part of the build, even if I
haven’t told it about preprocessors. This is good knowledge
to have about the build process
}}}

Indeed, we could perhaps avoid printing the status message unconditionally, but instead only do it if we're actually going to be doing any work.

{{{
Second, I’d like to highlight the line “building
interpreter-0.1”. Cabal is actually building a file called
dist\build\interp\interp.exe. But it’s not confusing me with
that – rather, it’s reminding me of the project name and
version I defined in my Cabal metadata file!
}}}

Perhaps we should make the configure message say the package name, but then for executables and libs say the name of the library or executable."	enhancement	new	normal	Cabal-1.8	Cabal library	1.6.0.1	normal				easy (<4 hours)