Tell cabal-install not to build in /tmp

Question

I am getting exit 1 errors from ld when attempting to cabal install hindent (the actual failing package is haskell-src-exts). By using sudo alternatives --config ld to select the gold linker, and then trying again, I was able to get a more meaningful error message: No space left on device. Turns out cabal install attempts to build projects in /tmp, which, on my machine, is a ramdisk that is not very large. How can I tell it to build projects elsewhere?

Answer 1

As answered here, the solution is to set the TMPDIR environment variable, like so:

mkdir $HOME/t
TMPDIR=$HOME/t 
cabal install hindent