kili:
On Mon, Aug 11, 2008 at 04:17:59PM +0100, Simon Marlow wrote: [...]
As for Cabal - we had a thread on cvs-ghc last week, and as I said there we'd love to hear suggestions for how to improve things, including wild and crazy ideas for throwing it all away and starting again. However, as I explained, there are good reasons for the way things are done now, the main one being that the build system for packages is not written twice.
Well, at least the Makefile creation was a step (the first step?) into the wrong direction, IMHO. I'll run a GHC build to get some of those generated Makefiles and followup on cvs-ghc, but for a starter, Cabal shouldn't know anything about implementation-specific internal build systems; instead it should rely only on it's own metadata. Implementation-specific stuff (such as how to run the compiler) should be supplied by the implementation, not by Cabal.
I see more and more workarounds for workarounds for an unmaintainable (and unusable) build system, and after the latest discussions about git vs. darcs, maintaining GHC-specific branches of libraries etc., I think I'll just drop maintainership from all GHC-related OpenBSD ports until the GHC build system chaos settles down a little bit.
Ian, please read this. The inability to build GHC reliably is a problem. Can someone with a plan please describe what measures are in place to ensure GHC emerges buildable, and the tree regains the status of a tree that *does not break*? -- Don