On Wed, May 11, 2011 at 6:13 PM, Gregory Crosswhite
<gcross@phys.washington.edu> wrote:
[snip]
1) Cabal is a tool that can only be used to build Haskell packages with some supporting C/C++ code thrown in
and
2) Cabal is currently the only tool that can realistically be used to properly build and install Haskell packages due to the great complexity involved with getting all the details right
I agree with much of what you said. I created this feature request for cabal, that I think would go quite aways towards addressing the problem, but someone marked it as wontfix:
In my opinion, the two most valuable things about cabal are its good dependency calculation and it allowed hackage to gain momentum. Unfortunately, we are also forced to use it as a build system and it's quite inadequate for that task. I say forced because there is no standard way to extract the dependency calculations from it. You have to write a Setup.hs file to extract it and it's not trivial. If you succeed at that task, then you can't even reuse the code without copy&pasting it later.
In fact, I never invoke cabal-install directly anymore. I've corrupted my package databases too many times. I make sure to always use cabal-dev for everything. I think that says something about cabal's efficacy as a build system.
Jason
ps. As soon as I figure out a way to get infinite free time I'll implement the translation to makefiles myself...