How to make cabal to list necessary libraries, and provide me the choose of their versions without automatical installation?

Question

I encountered some inconvenience when builded some package: the gtk. When I wrote cabal install gtk-0.12.4 it was trying to build it upon the MODERN dependence libraries. And it was failed. So I had to track install necessary versions of dependence libraries.

Is there convenient way to make cabal tell me, what dependencies should be installed, and I installed them myself, by choosing necessary version?

P. S.: The installation I talking about is described here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/22283107/2815429

Answer 1

You can start with

cabal install --dry-run --only-dependencies gtk-0.12.4

and look at what it would do. Then either install them manually, as you said, or add --constraint some-dependency==1.2.3.4 or similar parameters until you are satisfied with the version selection, and have cabal install it all in one go.