Do we therefore have no interest in compilers other than GHC? Can we drop all instances of ifdef __HUGS__ from the code? I think doing so would require a reasonable amount of work, but would significantly lower the barrier to contributing to Cabal. On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 3:04 AM, Ian Lynagh wrote:

Hi Ben,

On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 02:51:12AM +0000, Ben Millwood wrote:

...

- what is the oldest version of GHC we intend to support? - do we still support Hugs? what about other non-GHC implementations?

The HACKING file in the root directory says

Dependencies policy -------------------

Cabal's policy is to support being built by versions of GHC that are up to 3 years old.

Note that this is what compilers you can use to build Cabal, not what compilers Cabal can build libraries for.

Thanks Ian

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On 14 December 2012 23:33, Johan Tibell wrote:

On Fri, Dec 14, 2012 at 3:29 PM, Ben Millwood wrote:

...

Do we therefore have no interest in compilers other than GHC? Can we drop all instances of ifdef __HUGS__ from the code?

I think doing so would require a reasonable amount of work, but would significantly lower the barrier to contributing to Cabal.

I think so. To my knowledge there's no one who's actively maintaining and testing the Hugs support in Cabal. It's most likely broken.

We should distinguish the compilers that can build Cabal, from those that cabal supports. Cabal supports several compilers that cannot themselves build Cabal. I am happy to drop the support for building Cabal using hugs and nhc as I don't believe they have been used for some years. In particular this will let us fully use new-style IO exceptions, and the new createProcess function. Duncan

On Fri, Dec 14, 2012 at 11:29:23PM +0000, Ben Millwood wrote:

Do we therefore have no interest in compilers other than GHC? Can we drop all instances of ifdef __HUGS__ from the code?

It was intended to mean only that older versions of GHC aren't supported, not other Haskell implementations. I'm not sure what opinions are about supporting other impls. Thanks Ian