Re: Discussion: Hadrian's defaults

On Mar 15, 2019, at 2:19 AM, Herbert Valerio Riedel wrote: On Thu, Mar 14, 2019 at 4:20 PM Spiwack, Arnaud wrote: • The -c option should be the default. Very strong -1 from me on this one; I've been quite vocal on the Hadrian issue tracker early on and multiple times against having Hadrian invoke ./configure at all, even more so against having it do so by default. I don't have the ticket number at my fingertips but it should be fairly easy to find.

I'm with Herbert here. I think that the `-c` flag should be mandatory if you want hadrian to invoke autoconf magic. I believe the confusion might stem from the newcomers guide[1]? I'd rather see the newcomers guide *not* use `-c`, and instead make it obvious to call `boot` and `configure`. These are essential steps and hiding them makes them less obvious. `boot` does - (1) checks that url rewrites are in place. - (2) checks that all bootpackages are available - (3) run autoreconf as needed - (4) and generates a bunch of make files for the make based build system. (4) can be disabled by passing `--hadrian` to `boot`. (1) is needed due to the relative submodules I beleive. `configure` generates the necessary configuration files based on the configure flags passed. And hadrian does the actual build step that `make` used to do. It's magically conflating two different phases with `-c`. The configure phase and the build phase. Making this the default means it's always magic. I don't like magic! Cheers, Moritz -- [1]: https://github.com/tdammers/ghc-wiki/blob/wip/newcomers/newcomers-tutorial.m...