#11557: Unbundle Cabal from GHC -------------------------------------+------------------------------------- Reporter: ezyang | Owner: Type: task | Status: new Priority: normal | Milestone: 8.2.1 Component: libraries | Version: 8.1 (other) | Keywords: | Operating System: Unknown/Multiple Architecture: | Type of failure: None/Unknown Unknown/Multiple | Test Case: | Blocked By: Blocking: | Related Tickets: Differential Rev(s): | Wiki Page: -------------------------------------+------------------------------------- Recently, Duncan made it so that GHC proper does not depend on Cabal (so it is just ghc-pkg that is the user-facing executable which links against Cabal). We should now seriously consider unbundling Cabal from GHC, so that the default global database we provide does NOT include Cabal. Pros: * Distributions will be more likely to take point version releases to Cabal, as they no longer have to finesse updating Cabal without updating GHC as they have now * Stack is (improperly) coupling the version of Cabal they build with the release of GHC; while they should fix this, unbundling Cabal would also give them more flexibility with picking LTS packages. Cons: * Bootstrapping Cabal/cabal-install becomes modestly harder. Fortunately, cabal-install is already pretty obnoxious to bootstrap, so SOP is to just distribute binaries for this, in which case things are as easy as before. * We wouldn't be strictly adhering to the Cabal spec, which requires that the compiler always be able to build the Setup executable. * ghc-pkg would have to be statically linked -- Ticket URL: http://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/11557 GHC http://www.haskell.org/ghc/ The Glasgow Haskell Compiler