Hi, Ticket #19 [1], and maybe some big projects in general, need to be able to invoke ar/ld so that we don't run into issues in commandline lenght. (And in theory, compiler's as well, but we that'd require the dreaded deps analysis.) I think this is major feature we should resolve before GHC 6.6 goes out. It affects significantly some libraries, at least gtk2hs, and I can see real size benefits on some of my own libraries as well. I posted patch to fix this in some cases for Windows [2], but upon talking about it with Duncan, in irc, there's few exta points: * Some unixy shells apparently have restrictions as well, so this shouldn't be just Windows. * On my old implementation, I just split the commandlines by filecount, not according to actual space the paths take. Is this a major point? It can affect the number of tool invokations quite radically. * The algorithm should really be parametriseable because it is, I believe, in all cases heuristic. As how to proceed on implementing this, I'm a bit unsure. * Because of unicode conversion issues, I am not entirely sure if we can accurately know the length of commandline, atleast in Windows. Or going for the bad case, 4 bytes per character gives us a lot of setback in common case. * I think the common way to workaround this is by using xargs with some constant number per params (much like my current algos). * I think there is a diffrence between complexities, because with ar we really want to do append, but with ld we can do a tree-style build. I haven't benchmarked this. * This might be useful to generalise into library function(s). I could use some advice or experiences from other buildsystems. If nobody else steps up, I'll probably implement some choice (but I'm only prepared to test it in Windows.) [1] http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ticket/19 [2] http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/cabal-devel/2006-May/000006.html Best regards, --Esa Ilari Vuokko