Simon PJ and I had a talk about the build system earlier today, I thought I'd float the idea we discussed... I propose we do this:
- Extract the code from Cabal that generates Makefiles, and treat it as part of the GHC build system. Rather than generating a Makefile complete with build rules, we generate a Makefile that just has the package-specific metadata (list of modules, etc.), and put the code to actually build the package in the GHC build system.
This means we still get to use 'make', we still get to use the .cabal files as metadata, but the build system is more private to GHC, more extensible, and hopefully more understandable and modifiable...
... I'm interested in whether anyone thinks this idea is worth persuing, or whether there are better alternatives.
Simon, This direction sounds very promising. I hope you will keep us posted. Norman