On 22 February 2006 01:33, John Meacham wrote:

On Tue, Feb 21, 2006 at 04:50:20PM -0000, Simon Marlow wrote:

...

First of all, my position on this has always been (since we argued about this during the design of the FFI) that include files and libraries should be kept out of the source file and specified separately, since they are a part of the build infrastructure, and vary across platforms.

I lost the argument for include files, but this is why libraries cannot currently be specified inside source files. Back in the FFI discussion, we didn't have Cabal, but now that we do, Cabal is the natural place to specify these things.

the problem is that package granularity is way to big for specifying dependencies, jhc wants all dependencies attached to each FFI import. the reason being that it collects only the dependencies for things that are actually used so for instance the following works:

foreign import ccall "fcntl.h open" c_unix_open ... foreign import ccall "win32.h OpenFile" c_win_open ... foreign import lvm "lvmOpen" c_lvm_open ...

openFile = case os of "unix" -> ... c_unix_open ... "lvm" -> .... c_lvm_open ... "win32" ->.. c_win_open ...

and all the intermediate code remains platform independent.

You could still break this into packages - I guess I'm not convinced by the argument that packages have too large granularity. It seems nice, even, to put the OS-specific code into separate packages in this example. Cheers, Simon