On 5/11/11 3:11 PM, Bryan O'Sullivan wrote:
It's a fairly terrible piece of software.
My experience is that it is the only cross-platform build system I have
used to date that hasn't made my eyes bleed, though I only use it for
C/C++/Fortran. I suppose that counts as a personal testimonial in favor
of it. Put another way: it is definitely the worst of all build systems
--- except for all the rest. :-)
Also, my most recent experience with Cabal is that it is a serious PITA
if you want to do any non-trivial cross-language stuff with it, since
essentially its only support for non-Haskell stuff is its hard-coded
support for C/C++. It is true that you can add hooks to do arbitrary
stuff, but at that point you are basically bolting your own build system
on top of it and have to start from scratch --- or worse, *autotools*
(SHUDDER!)
At one point I was working on my own build system Blueprint that was a
generalized build system where GHC was just one specific tool within the
system, but although I got it working just fine, at some point
implementing all of the of the crazy stuff that is needed for proper GHC
package support burned me out so I stopped short of finishing it since
it's not like I didn't have other things to do with my time. :-) You
might ask why I didn't just use the Cabal libraries to help myself out,
and while I was able to get some use out of them unfortunately most the
functionality in the Cabal libraries is simply not designed to be used
by third parties. (For the curious, the sources are available at
www.github.com/gcross/blueprint; look at the *blueprint* branch, not
the *master* branch which was a first attempt that has been superseded
by a complete rewrite.)
So anyway, what it comes down to in my experience is
1) Cabal is a tool that can only be used to build Haskell packages with
some supporting C/C++ code thrown in
and
2) Cabal is currently the only tool that can realistically be used to
properly build and install Haskell packages due to the great complexity
involved with getting all the details right
Cheers,
Greg
_______________________________________________
Haskell-Cafe mailing list
Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org
http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
