On Sat, 2006-09-16 at 08:54 +0200, Duncan Coutts wrote:
Note that there is already a register --inplace flag to register a package in the build tree. To allow multiple packages to be built against each other inplace we'd also need some flag for configure.
Would this be enough? Do we really also need the ability to specify arbitrary package databases? What is the use case?
(BTW, I'm not saying we don't need it, I'm just wondering what people want it for)
From discussion on #ghc:
JHC and indeed every impl except GHC have no concept of a package db. JHC for example would certainly be able to support using a package in-place in the build tree and indeed could support an isolated build environment (indeed it's probably easier with JHC than GHC). So the suggestion is that it is these concepts of using inplace, or having an isolated build environment that should be supported by cabal since they can be mapped to appropriate things in each impl, rather than adding --yhc-pkg-foo and --ghc-pkg-bar flags. I think this has been Isaac's approach generally, to target the things that people are trying to do, rather than just exposing every underlying mechanism which people currently use to accomplish those goals. Duncan