Re: hadrian-util: An experiment in a more usable hadrian UX

This looks really useful, and might bridge the gap between the UX I'm used to and Hadrian, allowing me to adopt Hadrian sooner than I otherwise would. However, I would be disappointed to see hadrian-util still in active use when `make` is removed (#17527). I'm glad to see Ben's %Make removal milestone, which gives me more confidence that we'll wait until hadrian is really ready for prime-time before removing the old build system. Thanks! Richard

On Jan 5, 2020, at 6:30 PM, 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