That's right, Roman, not knowing anything about it would be even better!
Here is the same dependency info in a different format.
I also noticed that cabal has a more complete implementation of Version.
Couldn't this also move/merged with base (I think there is already a
Version module in base or something like that).
On Fri, Sep 6, 2013 at 10:17 AM, Niklas Hambüchen
On Fri 06 Sep 2013 22:52:40 JST, Roman Cheplyaka wrote:
The right solution for Cabal would be not to know anything about the GHC's database format at all.
GHC and cabal communicate via a command line interface (`ghc-pkg dump` in our direction; `ghc-pkg update` in the other). So it would suffice to have a library which implements parsing and printing of the package description, and have that library shared between GHC and Cabal.
You are right. This is better.
GHC's dependency on cabal seems to actually be quite minimal!
I did a quick grep:
% grep -rI "import Distribution" --include "*.hs" --include "*.lhs*" . | grep -v "libraries/" | grep -v Setup.hs | grep -v Setup.lhs | grep -v utils/haddock ./utils/ghc-cabal/Main.hs:import Distribution.PackageDescription ./utils/ghc-cabal/Main.hs:import Distribution.PackageDescription.Check hiding (doesFileExist) ./utils/ghc-cabal/Main.hs:import Distribution.PackageDescription.Configuration ./utils/ghc-cabal/Main.hs:import Distribution.PackageDescription.Parse ./utils/ghc-cabal/Main.hs:import Distribution.System ./utils/ghc-cabal/Main.hs:import Distribution.Simple ./utils/ghc-cabal/Main.hs:import Distribution.Simple.Configure ./utils/ghc-cabal/Main.hs:import Distribution.Simple.LocalBuildInfo ./utils/ghc-cabal/Main.hs:import Distribution.Simple.Program ./utils/ghc-cabal/Main.hs:import Distribution.Simple.Program.HcPkg ./utils/ghc-cabal/Main.hs:import Distribution.Simple.Utils (defaultPackageDesc, writeFileAtomic, toUTF8) ./utils/ghc-cabal/Main.hs:import Distribution.Simple.Build (writeAutogenFiles) ./utils/ghc-cabal/Main.hs:import Distribution.Simple.Register ./utils/ghc-cabal/Main.hs:import Distribution.Text ./utils/ghc-cabal/Main.hs:import Distribution.Verbosity ./utils/ghctags/Main.hs:import Distribution.Simple.GHC ( componentGhcOptions ) ./utils/ghctags/Main.hs:import Distribution.Simple.Configure ( getPersistBuildConfig ) ./utils/ghctags/Main.hs:import Distribution.Simple.Compiler ( compilerVersion ) ./utils/ghctags/Main.hs:import Distribution.Simple.Program.GHC ( renderGhcOptions ) ./utils/ghctags/Main.hs:import Distribution.PackageDescription ( library, libBuildInfo ) ./utils/ghctags/Main.hs:import Distribution.Simple.LocalBuildInfo ./utils/ghc-pkg/Main.hs:import Distribution.InstalledPackageInfo.Binary() ./utils/ghc-pkg/Main.hs:import Distribution.ModuleName hiding (main) ./utils/ghc-pkg/Main.hs:import Distribution.InstalledPackageInfo ./utils/ghc-pkg/Main.hs:import Distribution.Compat.ReadP ./utils/ghc-pkg/Main.hs:import Distribution.ParseUtils ./utils/ghc-pkg/Main.hs:import Distribution.Package hiding (depends) ./utils/ghc-pkg/Main.hs:import Distribution.Text ./utils/ghc-pkg/Main.hs:import Distribution.Version ./compiler/ghci/Linker.lhs:import Distribution.Package hiding (depends, PackageId) ./compiler/main/Packages.lhs:import Distribution.InstalledPackageInfo ./compiler/main/Packages.lhs:import Distribution.InstalledPackageInfo.Binary ./compiler/main/Packages.lhs:import Distribution.Package hiding (PackageId,depends) ./compiler/main/PackageConfig.hs:import Distribution.InstalledPackageInfo ./compiler/main/PackageConfig.hs:import Distribution.ModuleName ./compiler/main/PackageConfig.hs:import Distribution.Package hiding (PackageId) ./compiler/main/PackageConfig.hs:import Distribution.Text ./compiler/main/PackageConfig.hs:import Distribution.Version ./compiler/main/Finder.lhs:import Distribution.Text ./compiler/main/Finder.lhs:import Distribution.Package hiding (PackageId)
As you can see, there are only 4 files in ghc itself that depend on Cabal:
./compiler/ghci/Linker.lhs ./compiler/main/Packages.lhs ./compiler/main/PackageConfig.hs ./compiler/main/Finder.lhs
(plus 1 file for ghc-pkg: ./utils/ghc-pkg/Main.hs)
The ones in GHC core seem to rely only on quite basic data types.
From this, I would boldly claim that people have spent more time making the GHC build system work with this Cabal dependency than it would take stripping it off!
(In fact, I would try to do this right now if the GHC build system wouldn't take so long to compile even the smallest changes ...)
