On Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 12:48 PM, Jason Dagit <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 7:29 AM, David Roundy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> On Thu, Oct 16, 2008 at 2:25 PM, Jason Dagit <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> > * Now it seems as though the plan is to throw autotools out the window >> > on >> > all platforms and unconditionally. Meaning that on POSIX platforms we >> > are >> > changing something that isn't broken. >> >> No, the configure script *is* broken, it's just not as broken as cabal >> is. It doesn't allow very good forward-compatibility, only >> backward-compatibility, meaning with every major release of ghc, darcs >> is broke, because the configure script needs to explicitly mention >> every possible package that might contain a module that we use. >> Franchise fixes this bug. > > I couldn't figure out how Franchise fixes this from looking at the source > repository (and there doesn't seem to be any website or user documentation > other than an example or two of very simple projects that don't illustrate > this point). Could you please explain?
The darcs setup.hs script demonstrates this. It doesn't mention what packages are needed to build darcs, but franchise determines this, which means that if a package name is changed, darcs will still build. It's a problem, of course, that ghc --make also solves, except that ghc --make doesn't solve other problems like defining environment variables based on the presence of certain modules or external libraries. With franchise, so long as the API we use doesn't change, darcs will continue to build without modification (to either franchise, or the darcs build system) on future versions of ghc, because franchise knows how to search for packages that provide what we need. With autoconf, darcs can only continue to build if modules we use are not moved into new packages, and similarly with cabal. David _______________________________________________ darcs-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-users
