Matthias Kilian:
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.
I see more and more workarounds for workarounds for an unmaintainable
(and unusable) build system, and after the latest discussions about
git vs. darcs, maintaining GHC-specific branches of libraries etc.,
I think I'll just drop maintainership from all GHC-related OpenBSD
ports until the GHC build system chaos settles down a little bit.
Thanks for demonstrating my point...
Complicated build infrastructure and lack of portability used to be a
big problem for GHC in the past. Over the last years, the situation
got much better (to a large extent due to SimonM sanitising the
makefile-based build system). Why are we so keen to throw it all away
now?
Manuel
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