For reference, hadrian-util lives at: https://gitlab.haskell.org/bgamari/hadrian-util I quite like the idea of trying out improvements to the UX via an external wrapper. For wider adoption, we'd have to distribute it in a nicer way I suppose, but taking this one step at a time sounds good. On 05/01/2020 19:30, Ben Gamari wrote:
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
_______________________________________________ ghc-devs mailing list ghc-devs@haskell.org http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs
-- Alp Mestanogullari, Haskell Consultant Well-Typed LLP, https://www.well-typed.com/ Registered in England and Wales, OC335890 118 Wymering Mansions, Wymering Road, London, W9 2NF, England