
Hi everyone, For the past few months I have been using Hadrian for the majority of my GHC builds. In due course I have encountered a few papercuts: * hadrian/cabal.build.sh is quite wordy (#16250); moreover, you need to be in the source root to invoke it (#16667) * editing hadrian.settings is quite difficult due to the lack of availability of tab-completion in vim * maintaining multiple build roots is quite error-prone since you must remember which build flavour you used for each (#16481, #16638) * there is no equivalent to setting `stage=2` in `mk/build.mk` to make the stage-1-freeze persistent To address these I cobbled together a small wrapper, hadrian-util. I have this installed in my home-manager environment with a shell alias, `hu`, meaning that building GHC is as easy as typing `hu run` anywhere in the tree. As discussed in the README, `hadrian-util` supports multiple build roots, has a moderately convenient interface for manipulating hadrian.settings (with completion!) and has enough persistent state to eliminate most of the error-prone boilerplate from Hadrian invocations without being confusing. There is the question of what the long-term future of hadrian-util should be. Arguably it is merely a hack papering over some of the shortcomings of Hadrian's current UX; perhaps eventually these will be fixed. However, in the meantime, I've found that hadrian-util makes hadrian quite pleasant to use. I hope others also find this useful. Cheers, - Ben