On Mon, 2009-02-16 at 03:56 +1300, hamish@firestream.co.uk wrote:
Mon Feb 16 03:52:49 NZDT 2009 hamish@firestream.co.uk * Add flag to disable linking in build This is usefull when you just want to find compiler errors (eg. for background compilation while editing). Only implemented for GHC (others will die with an error if linking is disabled).
Hi Hamish, thanks for sending in the patch. It's a good idea to have a mode to just do checking rather than everything necessary to use or install a package. There are some improvements we could make to this patch: I think the user interface should reflect the fact that it is for checking only. I know that your current implementation does that by omitting linking but we could well imagine omitting more things like code generation. So having the UI talk about linking seems to be talking about internals rather than the users intention. In general the patch touches too many lines of code. It also seems to have many changes that are only white space changes eg: - let arVerbosity | verbosity >= deafening = "v" - | verbosity >= normal = "" - | otherwise = "c" + let arVerbosity | verbosity >= deafening = "v" + | verbosity >= normal = "" + | otherwise = "c" We should not mix this kind of aesthetic change with functional changes. I think we could make the change less invasive if we made the parameter a member of the LocalBuildInfo rather than passing the linking bool variable as an extra parameter in so many places. The LocalBuildInfo already tells us things that the user has instructed like if we're doing profiling or not. Only checking would seem to fall into the same category of information. I mentioned above that we might like to also omit code generation. It turns out that ghc has a flag `-fno-code`. However it also turns out not to work with the `--make` mode that Cabal uses. I filed a ticket about this so it may get fixed in future. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/3032 Duncan