Matthias Kilian wrote:
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.
I'm not completely sure, but I think you may have misunderstood how Cabal's makefile generation currently works. It has no specific knowledge of GHC's build system, and it does rely on its own metadata. (in my other message I'm suggesting moving the Makefile generation into GHC's build system so that it could be made specific to GHC, though).
Implementation-specific stuff (such as how to run the compiler) should be supplied by the implementation, not by Cabal.
This is what makes me unsure. Implementation of what? Are you suggesting a redesign of Cabal, or just changing the way something works? Cheers, Simon