Simon Marlow <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote,
> > Please, can somebody explain, why the preprocessor is
> > hardcoded in the GHC
> > perl scripts? IIRC ghc (the perlscript itself) doesn't even reference
> > $RAWCPP. mkdependHS and hscpp do, but why an absolute path
> > and this obscure
> > "-iprefix" parameter? Again, "-iwithprefix" is never used...
> >
> > Would it break things, if there is '$RAWCPP = "cpp
> > -traditional"' only?
>
> It isn't strictly speaking hardcoded, it's set up when you configure a
> binary distribution. So if you move gcc or install a new version, you need
> to re-install ghc.
I understand the technical issues, but the problem is that
installing/compiling GHC from source is a *pain* (and
requires you to have a machine with a lot of memory and a
fast CPU or a spare machine, which you can afford doing
nothing else for quite a while). So, IMHO, binary
distributions are *very important* for GHC. I am sure that
it is clear that a binary distribution with strict
dependencies on locations of other tools is far from ideal.
A (somewhat unsatisfactory) solution for package
manager-based distributions (like .rpm or .deb) would be to
use a post-install script that searches for cpp and patches
the path. To make this easier, it would be nice if the path
(and any other similar dependencies) where located in a
dedicated file where they are easy to find and patch.
> I suppose we can put in a configure test for known locations of cpp
> (/lib/cpp, /usr/libexec/cpp, /usr/lib/cpp) and use that in preference to
> anything else if it works.
Do you mean `./configure' at build time? Or a post-install
script (in the sense of my above comment).
Manuel
