Ian Lynagh wrote:
On Wed, Aug 08, 2007 at 04:19:29PM +0100, Simon Marlow wrote:
I've just made GHC's Cabal into a branch.
FWIW I think this is a mistake. It'll make changing Cabal as part of changes to the larger system harder, and increases the global amount of effort necessary.
Also, I think Cabal patches would benefit from being checked with GHC's testsuite.
I don't think that Duncan's argument that requiring validation of Cabal patches would hamper new developers is valid, as their patches will always be being applied by someone like Duncan, who could do the validation.
I'm not especially keen on having another branch either, but the alternative is that patches to Cabal must pass GHC's validate before being pushed, and that puts the burden on the Cabal developers to fix GHC and the core packages when breaking changes are made to Cabal - that doesn't seem right. OTOH it's true that the GHC build is a good testcase for Cabal (it looks like Cabal is broken right now, and testing with GHC would have discovered that). Duncan, any thoughts? Do you prefer the branch, or would you be happy to run GHC's validate before pushing to Cabal? This would affect people like Ross who push directly to Cabal too. Cheers, Simon