Moritz Angermann
Hi Arnaud,
... I second everything that Moritz said. Having spent countless hours fighting other projects' "non-traditional" build systems in the past, my heart fills with dread whenever I see a project trying to be "clever" with autoconf. Inevitably such cleverness ends up being a source poorly-documented, unpredictable, and at times broken behavior which inevitably complicates the task of building the project in any non-trivial configuration (for instance, cross-compilation). We should keep in mind that users and packagers, not GHC developers, are the primary audience of GHC's build system. For their sake we should strive to keep GHC's build system as close to the usual configure/make/make install workflow as possible. In fact, I have at times wondered whether when we switch to Hadrian as our primary build system we should ship our source distributions with a stub makefile to build and run hadrian, allowing downstreams to treat the distribution as a normal autotools-based package. Cheers, - Ben