Don Stewart wrote: > kili: > >> On Mon, Aug 11, 2008 at 04:17:59PM +0100, Simon Marlow wrote: >> [...] >> >>> As for Cabal - we had a thread on cvs-ghc last week, and as I said there >>> we'd love to hear suggestions for how to improve things, including wild >>> and crazy ideas for throwing it all away and starting again. However, as >>> I explained, there are good reasons for the way things are done now, the >>> main one being that the build system for packages is not written twice. >>> >> Well, at least the Makefile creation was a step (the first step?) >> into the wrong direction, IMHO. I'll run a GHC build to get some >> of those generated Makefiles and followup on cvs-ghc, but for a >> starter, Cabal shouldn't know anything about implementation-specific >> internal build systems; instead it should rely only on it's own >> metadata. Implementation-specific stuff (such as how to run the >> compiler) should be supplied by the implementation, not by Cabal. if we're going to kick on cabal I might throw in my two cents.
I see an increasing problem in that every community comes up with their own package system, instead of reusing existing frameworks. dependencies to other non-haskell libraries has to be addressed for every other coexisting package system (such as apt-get), if it is addressed at all. likewise, other languages depending on haskell will have trouble resolving dependencies. so my point is, if there will be any bigger reworking of cabal, I think one should consider how it could work as a module in a bigger (maybe future) meta-packaging framework, lifting up binaries to for example .deb, .exe-installer, .dmg or whatever is the most native for the platform. I see a point in language specific package systems as they have more insight into the build process, but the current implementations assume a very ideal world in which there are no other dependencies involved. /Johan _______________________________________________ Glasgow-haskell-users mailing list Glasgow-haskell-users@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users