I'd like to throw the following into the pot:
The Hugs and GHC developers work pretty hard to keep the two compilers compatible. For example, the next Hugs release will ship with libraries from the same source tree as GHC uses and the same foreign function interface as GHC and the GHC folk recently gave up a feature they dearly wanted in the foreign function interface in the name of portability.
So as people try to come up with a distribution and build mechanism that will work for GHC, it would be good to think about how that same mechanism would work for Hugs too.
Absolutely. I didn't mean to sound so GHC-centric. It would be great if the same infrastructure supports multiple compilers/interpreters.
For example, an extension of GHC's existing package mechanism might work well because it would be easy for Hugs to extract the pieces it needs and the package mechanism has little irrelevant stuff. In contrast a variation on the existing Makefile system would work poorly because the complexity for the library developer of buying into the infrastructure far exceeds the complexity of the task (which for Hugs is overcoming a few minor platform dependencies using autoconf or the like, building any foreign function interface libraries, and overcoming a few remaining Hugs-GHC incompatabilities).
Could you be more concrete? What extension of the package mechanism did you have in mind? (personally I had in mind a standard autoconf + Makefiles story for the build system, but I'm sure there are better ways). It'll be tricky to balance the requirements of a glorious all-encompassing infrastructure with keeping a low "buy-in" cost (as you put it), but that must be one of the goals or we won't have achieved anything.
We might also want to develop a common testing infrastructure for libraries which, ideally, would work with all compilers.
Right on. I'd like to propose we start from GHC's current testing system. It's a small collection of Python scripts (about 900 lines), and is designed to be compiler-independent, although I haven't used it with anything except GHC yet. Cheers, Simon