Cabal configure - What does "configure" mean?

Question

Which actions does the term "configure" cover in the command cabal configure?

I have read through documentation, but everything I can find essentially says "configure configures", or install also "configures".

Thank you.

Answer 1

By configure, it's referring to the options that can be set before building the program.

You can read these by running:

cabal configure --help

These include things like:

--prefix the destination directory

and

--extra-lib-dirs : object code libraries to link against when compiling

These two examples are similar to options which are traditionally specified in configure scripts which is where the name comes from, but now can be handled by cabal.

Flags can also be set in the cabal file which select specific modules to be built. An example of this can be seen in the in the text editor Yi, where specifying -f pango will build a graphical version of the editor whereas -f vty will build the console based version.