On Wed, 2007-10-24 at 14:34 +0200, Henning Thielemann wrote:
On Wed, 24 Oct 2007, Duncan Coutts wrote:
As far as I can see that covers all the cases where we might want "distributions", "shipments" or "sub-packages". Of course if anyone has any examples where they think our model might not cover things we should bring them up and consider them.
If it becomes much easier to handle multiple packages this might work. - Recompiling multiple packages must be simplified, because I use Cabal in the development phase.
Yes. We want to be able to build and use collections of packages inplace and to handle rebuilding automatically. Currently that has to be done manually by the developer which is a pain. I'd like to see Cabal do proper dependency analysis within and between packages in a source tree and build a single module dep graph and rebuild minimally (and in parallel). If this sounds an awful lot like make then that's no coincidence.
- It must be simple to distribute and to download multiple packages that belong together.
That is what cabal-install is for. It's available from hackage now although as somewhat of a preview. We'd like feedback on it, bug reports and patches. Then there are also the tools that convert cabal packages into native system packages and then we can let the native package manager handle the dependencies. For example I would imagine distributing Gtk2Hs as several .tar.gz packages on hackage. They would of course have interdependencies and most probably with very strict version ranges. One could then cabal-install the gtk package and have it pull in all of it's dependent packages, or when the distro package catches up then one could install that. My main point here is that it's perfectly possible to distribute a system as a bunch of packages. For example systems like Gnome or x.org's X windows system are distributed as 100's of individual .tar.gz packages with dependencies between them. This allows them to do incremental releases of bits of the system without having to do everything in one go.
It would be nice if one could maintain several packages which share the same 'src' directory in one darcs repository, which is of course duplicated on distribution.
Right, when you do a cabal sdist then it makes a tarball which contains all the files necessary to build that package. This may well duplicate shared files. Duncan