Relocatable Cabal sandboxes

Cabal 1.22 has preliminary support for relocatable packages, which is actually undocumented because I’m a bad patch writer.

Regardless, this preliminary support for relocatable packages partially enables relocatable sandboxes. What’s this partial part you might ask? Well, only the .cabal-sandbox directory is relocatable, not the sandbox config file. So basically the part that takes the longest time to build is relocatable. So, how do you go about the creating such a relocatable .cabal-sandboxdirectory? easy:

• cd <project_dir>

• cabal sandbox init

• cabal install --dependencies-only --enable-relocatable

The created .cabal-sandbox directory is relocatable anywhere on the machine, and across machines if ghc is installed in the same directory. Even dynamically linked libraries will work on Linux and OS X because the libraries will use relative RPATHs.

All that’s left to having truly relocatable sandboxes, is to make the .config files also relocatable. And I should write some documentation for the next Cabal release.