Re: RFC: changes to -i flag for finding source files

On 30/05/14 11:10, John Meacham wrote:

On Fri, May 30, 2014 at 2:45 AM, Daniel Trstenjak wrote:

...

Well, it might not be terribly surprising in itself, but we just have quite complex systems and the not terribly surprising things just accumulate and then it might get surprising somewhere.

I really prefer simplicity and explicitly.

If a central tool like GHC adds this behaviour, then all other tools are forced to follow.

Well, I just proposed it as an alternative to some of the other ideas floated here. A command line flag like -i would definitely be ghc specific and inherently non-portable.

Just to clarify this point, what I proposed was not intended to be compiler-specific, because it would be a change to the hs-source-dirs field of a .cabal file, and implemented in whatever way each compiler wants to do it. In the case of GHC the hs-source-dirs are just wrapped in -i flags. Still, I'm not planning to push the change into GHC because (a) changes are needed in Cabal and a few other places, (b) opinion was divided, and (c) it's not a big enough win. JHC's semantics would also need changes in Cabal, incidentally, for the same reason: supporting 'sdist' (and possibly other reasons that I've forgotten). Cheers, Simon