Hi all, I have a project which currently uses Cabal, and I would like to switch to using a plain Makefile. I have two examples of projects that use Makefiles, darcs and jhc, but they both appear to hand-code the list of dependencies for executables. The "-M" option to ghc should let us do this automatically, but either because of a deficiency in GHC or in GNU Make, that looks to be impossible or difficult. Does anyone have experience with this? Since I'm not using the multi-compiler features of Cabal, I think it shouldn't be too hard to get the project-specific part of my Makefile down to the size of the .cabal file. Many thanks, Frederik P.S. I want to use 'make' rather than Cabal because: - I want to be able to rebuild specific targets, rather than building everything every time - I want better dependency inference, for instance I don't want to relink every executable every time I do a build (I think this is fixed in newer versions of ghc, but not the one I use) - I ultimately want to be able to use a more sophisticated build system than Cabal's. GNU Make is a good first start, because it allows me to run several jobs simultaneously, for instance potentially utilizing multiple processors. In the future, I want to write a build system that does result caching as well. There are a lot of tricks that can be done in build systems, so in general I think it would be good to have a build system which is separable from the domain-specific configuration and compiler logic, rather than coupling them as Cabal and "ghc --make" do. The compile / fix compiler errors cycle is an important part of the development process for me, and so I want recompilation to go as quickly as possible. By the way, the GHC user manual claims that using --make is much faster than using a Makefile, but in a test on a small program, the difference was not significant (16 seconds vs. 18 seconds). Furthermore, some build systems are able to combine targets, e.g. running "ghc -c Bar.hs -c Foo.hs" instead of "ghc -c Bar.hs; ghc -c Foo.hs", which should eliminate the already small difference. -- http://ofb.net/~frederik/