Installed executables take precedence over build-tool-depends

[sol]

Describe the bug
Executables from ~/.local/bin¹ shadow executables that are specified via build-tool-depends.

Why is this a problem? How can this corrupt your builds in non-obvious ways? How much effort is it to debug this? I'm not going into rant mode now, please use your own judgment.

Instead, I will describe the underlying reasons for this bug and possible solutions in a follow-up comment.

To Reproduce
A minimal skeleton that can be used to reproduce the issue is at https://github.com/sol/cabal-bug/tree/build-tools

You may need to adapt this according to your OS and whether you have an existing ~/.cabal or not. So make sure that you fully understand what it is doing before you run it.

System information
Operating system: Linux
cabal: 3.10.1.0
ghc: 9.6.1

Footnotes

1. Note that this may be ~/.cabal/bin on your system. ↩

[sol]

Underlying reasons

1. When you first run cabal it adds

   extra-prog-path: ~/.local/bin

   to ~/.config/cabal/config.

   cabal/cabal-install/src/Distribution/Client/Config.hs

   Line 669 in 3674900

   return [dir </> ".local" </> "bin"]

2. cabal-install ensures that build tools (specified via build-tool-depends) are on the PATH.

3. Cabal prepends extra-prog-path to the PATH¹. At this point executables from ~/.local/bin take precedence over build tools, resulting in the bug.

Footnotes

1. Related: prepend rather than append extra prog path #8506 ↩

[sol]

Possible solutions

I see two ways to address this issue. Note that they are not mutually exclusive. We could (and probably should) do both:

1. Don't add extra-prog-path to ~/.config/cabal/config in the first place¹. While this will not change anything for existing users, it will improve the situation for new users or if you start from a clean system. (implemented in Installed executables take precedence over build-tool-depends #8951)
2. Make sure that build tools take precedence over --extra-prog-path.

(1) Is a trivial change. This is why I would do that first.

(2) Is more involved due to the split responsibilities between cabal-install / Cabal.

Footnotes

1. Note that this was added 10 years ago (https://github.com/haskell/cabal/commit/66a1bbf9eca4aa95cda5476bcd031401bf1e3f46), pre-dating build-tool-depends. With build-tool-depends at our disposal I think the original motivation no longer holds much weight. ↩

[gbaz]

Thanks for the reproducer. This is a regression in 3.10 likely induced by #8506 -- the code is very gnarly around how this stuff works, so need to think carefully on best way to fix it.

[gbaz]

Reverting the specific change to Configure.hs here resolves this issue, but then breaks the other behavior that 8506 intended to introduce:

https://github.com/haskell/cabal/pull/8506/files#diff-fff9e57c2727835086925d886619deb3fafd33a06e1af760d60d485ae07cec68R853

The deeper diagnosis is that invoke in SetupWrapper.hs is called by v2-build to run the actual build, performed by Cabal-the-library. It sets a PATH including the paths of tools created in build-tool-depends at the head. Then the Setup in Cabal-the-library in turn adds the extra-prog-path stuff even further, in front of that.

My proposed, janky-as-heck, solution is to have the path from extra-prog-path eagerly added at the end of the useExtraPathEnv option in SetupScriptOptions.

We would then also need to still revert the above, so it also gets added at the end (in the case we're not in a -v2 build). This means that the usefulness of 8506 is lost in the non v2-build case, but I suppose its the least bad thing I can imagine. Ugh!