duncan.coutts:
It is important to me that jhc be as widely accessible at possible. The number of machines './configure && make install' will work on outnumbers those that cabal install will work on hundreds or thousands to one.
I've sometimes wondered why nobody has made a generic configure.ac and makefile that wraps the Cabal build procedure. It seems pretty straightforward and it might help lower barriers for some users, especially, as John mentions, potential users from outside the community.
Yes. Reuse. That's why we moved to Cabal in the first place - to avoid reimplementing Makefiles, .hi rules, .o rules, and ld linking arguments once per Haskell library, which wasn't scalable in the slightest. We could come back, and have the 'make && make install' fans wrap up cabal with a generic wrapper for people who like to type 'make'. -- Don