Re: Remove Setup.hs, use Setup.lhs only

Ian Lynagh wrote:

On Sat, Nov 25, 2006 at 09:57:50AM -0800, Isaac Jones wrote:

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Ross Paterson writes:

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On Wed, Nov 22, 2006 at 01:36:13AM +0000, Duncan Coutts wrote:

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Note that in future we intend to allow there being no Setup.(l)hs at all when using cabal-setup. No Setup.(l)hs file would be equivalent to the basic one that uses defaultMain.

Could we have an optional field in the package description to tell cabal-setup which setup to use? There could be tokens representing

main = Distribution.Simple.defaultMain main = Distribution.Simple.defaultMainWithHooks defaultUserHooks main = Distribution.Make.defaultMain

Since we've decided to go with making Setup.[l]hs optional, I agree

What's the advantage of making it optional, especially now we have mkcabal to make the defaultMain Setup.lhs for us? It would be much simpler, IMO, if it was the case that all cabal packages have a Setup.lhs file.

As we need to support the presence of a Setup.lhs, no tool can be made simpler by allowing it to be absent (and many will need a little extra complexity to cope), and the only saving is a tiny amount of compilation for one (admittedly common) case.

Lets we forget, the main reason for wanting cabal-setup was so that it can read the .cabal file and select the right version of the Cabal package to use when reading Setup.l?hs, so we can handle Setup.lhs scripts that depend on particular versions of the Cabal API. It has been quite common to encounter compile errors in Setup.lhs scripts recently, and this is very confusing for users. Cheers, Simon