duncan.coutts:
On Mon, 2008-08-18 at 18:22 -0700, Don Stewart wrote:
Tim wins the prize for the 500th Haskell package in Arch Linux,
Which, I should like to note, demonstrates why the original Cabal design[1] was basically right[2] in that it allows this kind of automated translation into native packages.
You cannot do that with autoconf.
The other distros are following a similar course though not yet quite as successfully as Don has demonstrated for Arch. There are similar translation tools for Gentoo, Debian and RPM-based distros with varying levels of sophistication and automation. I think the folks who hack on these translation tools should get together and share code and experience so we can all achieve better levels of automation. The highest levels of automation will also require more centralised QA on hackage. That's where we should be going.
Duncan
[1] http://haskell.org/cabal/proposal/index.html [2] I'm not at all claiming credit for that design. That was decided well before I started hacking on Cabal.
Yes, I want to write something about this soon, but essentially, having a pure, declarative specifcation language for build dependencies -- with no runtime initialisation (yes, I'm looking at you, autoconf!) to define how the package is constructed -- enables analysis and translation tools like cabal2arch, which are an order of magnitude more productive. Use build-type: Simple! One person can maintain 500 packages with minimal manual intervention, while our competitors (6 erlang packages, 21 ocaml packages, 494 python packages :) have to waste a lot more manpower keeping things in shape. Cabal is going to benefit Haskell a lot in the long term -- this kind of productivity improvement is game changing. This leads nicely into the question of where we go from here. We have central hosting, a declarative build system of the first order, and native packages that are easy to construct. The next phase is a standard, comprehensive platform of packages, we can rely on, built upon the automation Cabal enables. See the Batteries Included proposal[1] for more info. -- Don [1] http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/papers/CPJS08.html