Simon PJ and I had a talk about the build system earlier today, I thought I'd float the idea we discussed (I should admit that the idea was mine, lest Simon PJ think I'm attributing bad ideas to him :-). This is not completely thought through, but I'm pretty sure a solution exists along these lines that would improve things for us. Ok, the starting point is this: - Cabal has code to generate Makefiles. Almost nobody uses it except for the GHC build system. It essentially duplicates the build system for compiling Haskell source (but not for installation, haddocking, registration, configuration, etc.) - Cabal is a library I propose we do this: - Extract the code from Cabal that generates Makefiles, and treat it as part of the GHC build system. Rather than generating a Makefile complete with build rules, we generate a Makefile that just has the package-specific metadata (list of modules, etc.), and put the code to actually build the package in the GHC build system. This means we still get to use 'make', we still get to use the .cabal files as metadata, but the build system is more private to GHC, more extensible, and hopefully more understandable and modifiable. We can express dependencies that Cabal currently doesn't know about. It would let us avoid the current uncomfortable situation where we have to feed all kinds of configuration information from the GHC build system into Cabal - Cabal would be essentially just a mechanism for translating the .cabal file into Makefile bindings and package metadata for ghc-pkg. There will undoubtedly be some sticking points where we have to tradeoff duplicating things from Cabal against re-using parts of Cabal which might require modifying Cabal itself. For instance, we could use Cabal for installation, but that means that our build system has to leave everything in the places that Cabal's installation code expects, so it might be more feasible to do installation ourselves, but that means duplicating parts of Cabal. It will probably mean that we have a tighter dependency on Cabal, because we use it as a library rather than a black box; but hopefully we can keep our branch of Cabal more stable and not have to update it so often. Anyway, this is an idea that I think is interesting. Obviously it needs a lot more fleshing out to be a real proposal, but I'm interested in whether anyone thinks this idea is worth persuing, or whether there are better alternatives. Cheers, Simon