It looks like some fairly core packages like process and time do not include the configure script, instead requiring the user to run autoreconf -i. The source dist, on the other hand, includes the configure script. This causes issues when those packages are referenced by git repo - see this and this.

Two options here:

1. Run autoreconf -i automatically? Seems ok. Does cabal-install do this? Do we care what it does? Perhaps we should just detect the absence of a configure script, and try this incase it works.

2. Fix the packages to include the configure script.

Thoughts?

For those who are visiting this issue, the workaround is straightforward. Just check out the dependency as a git repo, add it to your packages list, and run autoreconf -i