I've just had a struggle to build darcs for the first time in a while.
It would be helpful to have a proper list of requirements documented
either in the manual (maybe not so good if you can't build the manual)
or in README, or at least on the web page.

The major difficulty I had was getting the required version of
Quickcheck (on Ubuntu 8.04/8.10, for what it's worth).  However, I think
there are other things you need which I already had installed from
previous goes, but which aren't listed.

On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 07:11:39AM +0000, Dave Love wrote:
> It would be helpful to have a proper list of requirements documented
> either in the manual (maybe not so good if you can't build the manual)
> or in README, or at least on the web page.

This information is codified in darcs.cabal, by the build-depends:
entries.  It is not easy to read this file unless you already have
some cabal-fu, so I agree that this should be addressed.

> The major difficulty I had was getting the required version of
> Quickcheck (on Ubuntu 8.04/8.10, for what it's worth).

Fortunately this is not longer a problem in the Darcs 2.2.0 release,
as the optional QuickCheck dependency (which is only useful for
developers) is now truly optional.  Sorry about the inconvenience
there.

Trent Buck <bugs@darcs.net> writes:

> This information is codified in darcs.cabal, by the build-depends:
> entries.  It is not easy to read this file unless you already have
> some cabal-fu, so I agree that this should be addressed.

I don't know cabal, but as far as I remember, that was a problematic
dependency anyhow.

I'm now a bit confused about what actually worked on my Ubuntu 8.04
system since I messed it up trying to install the latest ghc, but I
think I had to import packages from the 8.10 version to build darcs
recently.  That's doubtless not your problem, but it's probably a useful
sort of thing to document.  If it's useful, I can purge everything and
check.

The following patch updated the status of issue1312 to be resolved:

* Resolve issue1312: update and reduce build notes. 
Ignore-this: 1097926092b457e090ad4870aedb4cc9
Recommend using pre-built binaries, or cabal-install.
Explain how to use cabal without cabal-install.
Update the list of build dependencies.
Keep the dependency list (against my better judgement), but be very
clear that this list is only a copy, and will grow stale over time.

Explain autotools, but mention that it is deprecated.
Remove lengthy discussion of Windows madness, on the basis that
Windows users will generally use pre-built binaries or cabal-install.

Remove out-of-place, stale-ish "darcs send" discussion.  It can be
reinserted elsewhere if it's really necessary (a HACKING file in the
source tree would be easier to discover).