On 13/08/2008, at 17:47, Simon Marlow wrote:
Roman Leshchinskiy wrote:
On 12/08/2008, at 20:11, Simon Marlow wrote:
- Extract the code from Cabal that generates Makefiles, and treat
it as
part of the GHC build system. Rather than generating a Makefile
complete with build rules, we generate a Makefile that just
has the package-specific metadata (list of modules, etc.), and put
the code to actually build the package in the GHC build system.
Sounds good. It would be nice if the .cabal parser from Cabal could
be made into a separate, stable library which ghc (and nhc?) could
use.
This makes me wonder, though. Wouldn't this model make more sense
for Cabal in general than the current approach of duplicating the
functionality of autoconf, make and other stuff? If it works ghc,
it ought to work for other projects, too. Cabal as a preprocessor
seems much more attractive to me than as a universal build system.
So packages would be required to provide their own build system?
That sounds like it would make it a lot harder for people to just
create a package that others can use. The ease of making a Cabal
package has I think a lot to do with the wealth of software
available on Hackage.
Of course there should be a standard build system for simple packages.
It could be part of Cabal or a separate tool (for which Cabal could,
again, act as a preprocessor).
GHC is a special case: we already need a build system for other
reasons.
I agree. I just don't think that adding a full-fledged build system to
Cabal is the solution. In my experience, huge monolithic tools which
try to do everything never work well. I much prefer small, modular
tools. A Haskell-based build system is an interesting project but why
does it have to be a part of Cabal?
It was a design decision early on with Cabal that we didn't want to
rely on the target system having a Unix-like build environment. You
might disagree with this, but it certainly has some value: a Windows
user can download GHC and immediately start building and installing
external packages without having to install Cygwin.
I agree with this decision but IIUC, this only really works for simple
(wrt building) packages which don't even use configure. Making Cabal
into a modular preprocessor and providing a thin wrapper for ghc --
make which can act as a target for Cabal would achieve this just as
well.
Roman
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