On Sun, 2013-03-17 at 21:04 +0100, Henning Thielemann wrote:
On Sun, 17 Mar 2013, Ian Lynagh wrote:
I think it would be feasible to stop GHC itself from using the human readable format. The only place I can think of it being used is in the package database, but we could use either Read/Show for that, or just exclusively use the binary format.
I already needed the human readable format in order to check what information a custom configure file generated.
Or more generally, the classic way to make the pkg info if you were not using the "simple" cabal build system, but were using configure + make (e.g. wrapped in the cabal "make" build-type) was to generate the input file using configure/m4 text substitutions. So that did/does need to be human readable. As for the binary format, that's ghc's internal representation and not something I think we would want to standardise between Haskell implementations. Note that other Haskell impls use a package database that just uses these human readable files, with no hc-pkg style program. Duncan