On Thu, Jul 24, 2014 at 9:56 AM, Edward Z. Yang <ezyang@mit.edu> wrote:
We were wondering if there was any reason to prefer the former
situation over the latter. One answer might be that Cabal is less keen
to have a dependency on a very GHC specific library (although the
ghc-pkg dependency is quite a fairly tightly coupled one.)

I continue to think cabal-install should use a plugin architecture. How that is relevant here is that either the Cabal library also would use plugins, or the existing Cabal library would stop pretending to be compiler-agnostic and become a Cabal-ghc plugin/library. (Or quite possibly both, depending on expected usage.)

(Of course, then there is the question of how to do compiler-agnostic plugins that have a chance of working with currently nonexistent alternative compilers....)

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