Ross Paterson
On Sat, Nov 25, 2006 at 09:57:50AM -0800, Isaac Jones wrote:
So a summary of the new rules would be something like:
* Setup.lhs will be found automatically, as it is now.
* Setup.hs will be found and complained about with an error. Maybe in the interim, we can have a warning. In the common case, the error can be fixed by deleting Setup.hs and using cabal-setup :)
* Setup will become optional, and cabal-setup will do the job of defaultMain (or whatever is in the new field).
* A new field will be introduced to indicate what kind of build system cabal-setup should use, in the absense of a Setup.lhs file.
I'd suggest putting the last two slightly differently. As I understood it, the idea of cabal-setup is that you have it pre-compiled on your system, and you always run it, because it's smart enough to find a compiler and suitable Cabal version to execute Setup.lhs.
Right!
If this field is set to something other than Custom, cabal-setup can ignore Setup.lhs, and just do the appropriate thing itself (making Setup.lhs optional).
That's a good idea. People can include Setup.lhs to be backward compatible, but if the Build-Type field is Custom (for instance) we can ignore it. I guess if they say "Custom" then we look for Setup.lhs only, (and maybe Setup.hs to give a helpful hint). I think I mentioned the idea of letting them give an arbitrary path, but that just seems like a bad idea.
For backward compatibility, you'd probably want the default value of the new field to be Custom, though this would mean you couldn't omit Setup.lhs unless this field was set.
Right.
Ross, how do you see the fields panning out? Want to implement it? :)
Something like
Build-Type: (Simple|Configure|Make|Custom)
I'd be happy to implement it, if/when we get agreement.
Cool. What do others think of all this? peace, isaac