Skip to content
  • Duncan Coutts's avatar
    Fix implementation of addBuildableCondition · 40d1b4f1
    Duncan Coutts authored
    The addBuildableCondition function was added to solve the problem with
    "buildable: False". The problem was that we would solve or check
    dependencies on the basis of the component in question being needed, and
    then at the end discover that the component is actually not buildable at
    all, and if we'd known that up front we would not have solved for the
    component's dependencies.
    
    The trick that addBuildableCondition does is a syntactic transformation,
    from components like:
    
    executable blah
      buildable: False
      build-depends: foo >= 1, bar < 2
      something-else: whatever
    
    to:
    
    executable blah
      -- empty!
    
    Or at least, that's the intention. In the above situation the
    implementation of addBuildableCondition returns an empty CondNode:
    
    CondNode mempty mempty []
    
    The type at which mempty is used is important here. This transformation
    is used in two places: one in the solver and the other in finalizePD.
    In the solver the mempty is used at types from the PackageDescription:
    Library, Executable, TestSuite etc. So in this case the transformation
    works fine we end up with empty executables, test suites etc.
    
    In finalizePD however the mempty gets used at type PDTagged (which is
    sort of a union of Library, Executable etc plus none/null) and the
    mempty for PDTagged is PDNull which means it does not even specify
    which component we're referring to. So effectively that means instead of
    ending up with an empty executable in the above example, we end up
    deleting the executable entirely!
    
    This was a change in behaviour. Prior to adding addBuildableCondition
    the result of finalizePD would include non-buildable components and the
    rest of the build system infrastructure was set up to skip over them
    when building. The change was not noticed precisely because the rest of
    the system was already set up to ignore non-buildable components.
    
    This is not however a benign change in behaviour. In particular in
    cabal-install in the install plan we end up completley forgetting about
    all the non-buildable components. This means we cannot even report that
    components are non-buildable when users ask to build them, because we've
    completely forgotten that they exist.
    
    So this patch keeps the original addBuildableCondition for use by the
    solver since the solver uses it at sensible monoid types. The patch adds
    a special version for the PDTagged type which changes the transformation
    so that in the above example we end up with:
    
    executable blah
      buildable: False
      something-else: whatever
    
    So we've stripped out all the build-depends but we keep everything else,
    including of course the "buildable: False".
    40d1b4f1