On Wed, 2008-08-13 at 16:19 +1000, Manuel M T Chakravarty wrote:
In a sense, it was an interesting experiment and it should still be useful to the development of Cabal. In fact, I see no reason why the experiment cannot be continued on a branch. Who knows, maybe Cabal is sufficiently mature in a year to make a switch worthwhile? I just object to using the whole GHC developer community as guinea pigs.
Sadly, I'm not so sure we've really learnt much that helps Cabal itself. While there's been a lot of general pain I can't think of many specific issues we've discovered in Cabal. We added a couple of minor features, some of which we'd have needed anyway for building the libs for 6.10 (eg due to the base-3/4 thing). As far as I can see, most of the problems have been in the change itself and the makefile glue code. I may well me missing some things since I've not been intimately involved in the changes. I would most appreciate specific problems or missing features being filed as tickets in the Cabal trac so that we can learn things and not forget them. Roman filed #276 "Add support for convenience libraries" and I appreciate that. I know about the longer term need for dph for a more general 'ways' system in ghc's package system, which will need support in Cabal. I'll file a ticket for that one. Duncan