On Mon, 2007-06-25 at 11:43 -0400, Peter Tanski wrote:
It would be much better to have a single build system. I would gladly replace the whole thing for three reasons:
(1) it is a source of many build bugs and it makes them much more difficult to track down; and, (2) it seems to be a serious hurdle for anyone who wants to build and hack on GHC--this is true for most other compiler systems that use the autoconf and Make; and, (3) if GHC is ever going to have cross-compilation abilities itself, the current build system must go, while cross-compiling GHC with the current system requires access to the actual host-system hardware. The reasons I don't are: (1) time (parallel to money); (2) I wouldn't undertake such an effort unless we were all pretty sure what you want to change the build system to; (3) an inevitable side-effect of the move would be loss of old (or little-used) build settings, such as GranSim, and a change to the build system would propagate to parallel projects; and, (4) it is a huge project: both the compiler and libraries must change and the change must integrate with the Cabal system.
I am thinking of starting a new project (possibly as sourceforge) to implement a new build system. I think Erick Tryzelaar might also be interested. The rule would be: it isn't just for GHC. So any interested people would have to thrash out what to implement it in, and the overall requirements and design ideas. My basic idea is that it should be generic and package based, that is, it does NOT include special purpose tools as might be required to build, say, Haskell programs: these are represented by 'plugin' components. A rough model of this: think Debian package manager, but for source code not binaries. -- John Skaller <skaller at users dot sf dot net> Felix, successor to C++: http://felix.sf.net