Roman Leshchinskiy wrote:
Of course there should be a standard build system for simple packages. It could be part of Cabal or a separate tool (for which Cabal could, again, act as a preprocessor).
GHC is a special case: we already need a build system for other reasons.
I agree. I just don't think that adding a full-fledged build system to Cabal is the solution. In my experience, huge monolithic tools which try to do everything never work well. I much prefer small, modular tools. A Haskell-based build system is an interesting project but why does it have to be a part of Cabal?
Hmm, but you said above "there should be a standard build system for simple packages. It could be part of Cabal...". Cabal has two parts: some generic infrastructure, and a "simple" build system (under Distribution.Simple) that suffices for most packages. We distribute them together only because it's convenient; you don't have to use the simple build system if you don't want to. I think perhaps you're objecting to the fact that the "simple" build system isn't so simple, and we keep adding more functionality to it. This is true, but the alternative - forcing some packages to provide their own build system - seems worse to me. Cheers, Simon