Roman Leshchinskiy wrote:
But that is precisely my (other) point. A lot of that work is really
unnecessary and could be done by Cabal since it only or mostly depends
on the package information. Instead, it is implemented somewhere in
Distribution.Simple and not really usable from the outside. For
instance, a lot of the functionality of setup sdist, setup register and
so on could be implemented generically and used by a make-based build
system as well.
That's exactly what I'm proposing we do in GHC: re-use Cabal's setup
register and some of the other parts of the simple build system in a
make-based build system for packages. It might require a bit of
refactoring of Cabal, but I don't expect it to be a major upheaval at all.
I think what you're proposing is mostly a matter of abstracting parts of
Cabal with cleaner and more modular APIs, which is absolutely a good thing,
but doesn't require a fundamental redesign. The tight coupling and lack of
separation between Cabal's generic parts and the simple build system is
somewhat accidental (lazy implementors :-), and is actually a lot better
than it used to be thanks to the work Duncan has put in. I'm sure it'll
improve further over time.
The other part of your complaint is that the BuildInfo is in the .cabal
file along with the PackageDescription (the types are pretty well separated
internally). Again I don't think there's anything fundamental here, and in
fact some packages have separate .buildinfo files.
Cheers,
Simon
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