Hey Neil. FYI, we now have a cabal-devel mailing list also for those interested in getting involved in cabal development. This mailing list is still appropriate for user questions or what-have-you, and I'm sure most of us stil read it :) "Neil Mitchell" writes:

I'm interested in using Cabal to build the base library, just like any other library. Does this have any chance of working? How much work would it take?

I thought this already was happening? At least in GHC, I see libraries/base/base.cabal.

At the moment the libraries build script has broken on Windows loads of times, and if Cabal was used it would be nicer, less code, and more cross platform.

Especially once we get cabal-install working to analyze the dependencies.

I'd also like to compile libraries for Hat, Yhc and Catch, and if I can reuse cabal to do this that would be great.

Please do!

If this work was done, would it be possible to reduce the installation script for the full haskell.org libraries to get library, cabal config, cabal build, cabal install?

With the new cabal-install, you could possibly do: cd ghc/libraries cabal-install */*.cabal (assuming you already have cabal and stuff)

So just a general question about what needs doing,

I don't think I understand you completely, so please let me know a bit more detail. Cabal is already used for building the libraries, at least for hugs, and I think for ghc, but perhaps not. Tweaking the ghc makefiles is probably necessary if that's what you want to do.

who is capable of doing it, and what I can do to get it working.

YOU are capable of helping out w/ cabal-install and adding Hat & yhc support to cabal :) Paolo and Duncan are leadng the cabal-install effort. peace, isaac