+1 for Carter's proposal - I had actually been planning to make the same
suggestion, but just saw this thread now...
On 27 January 2014 09:39, Austin Seipp
As for shipping with GHC itself: this is technically possible, but slightly annoying to implement, and it also makes the build processes for a release slightly more annoying (which is mostly my problem.) But it is all doable. However, keep in mind I *do not* maintain the binary distributions for everything, nor do Cabal devs have access to all hardware - so all people making upstream releases for their platforms (i.e. Solaris, PowerPC, ARM/Linux, etc) must also package cabal themselves. But perhaps that's not a huge deal.
If ghc provided cabal-install I would be happy to ship that in Fedora instead of a separate package. To me cabal-install is probably the most important tool/package in HP (except for ghc itself of course): many people build/bootstrap latest ghc themselves it seems and so providing the latest cabal-install out of the box too would be a big win IMO, making it much easier to test ghc. (I wouldn't even mind if ghc shipped cabal-install's dependencies too.) Jens ps Of course it could be made a configure option whether to build cabal-install or now: the cabal-install source is already there. ;) :)