Greetings. I'm keen to try to stabalize more of the Cabal interface,
but I'm not sure the best way to go about that. I started a wiki page
to start to document what is stable and what is not. Eventually this
should move into the end-user documentation:
http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/wiki/StableInterfaces
Does anyone have clever ideas for how to go about pushing these
interfaces toward stability? Do we just need to declare that certain
things are unstable for the near-term (and possibly implement the
eternal compatibility in theory idea[1]) and continue to experiment
with them until they seem done enough? Do we stare at them very hard?
Below[2] are my thoughts about what we _know_ to be stable, and the
types for the new hooks interface.
peace,
isaac
[1] http://www.haskell.org/tmrwiki/EternalCompatibilityInTheory
[2] Here's a summary of the bits of interface that need to be
stabalized, or are already stabalized.
Stable Commands
* ./setup configure
o --prefix
o --user
o --ghc, --hugs
o --verbose
* ./setup build
* ./setup install
Unstable Commands
* everything else. well, they're really _pretty_ stable.
Stable functions
* defaultMain
* defaultMainWithHooks defaultUserHooks
o but regular defaultMainWithHooks isn't stable since userHooks changes.
Unstable functions
* Various utility functions
* UserHooks
runTests :: Args -> Bool -> PackageDescription -> LocalBuildInfo -> IO ExitCode, -- ^Used for @.\/setup test@
readDesc :: IO (Maybe PackageDescription), -- ^Read the description file
hookedPreProcessors :: [ PPSuffixHandler ],
-- ^Custom preprocessors in addition to and overriding 'knownSuffixHandlers'.
hookedPrograms :: [Program],
-- ^These programs are detected at configure time. Arguments for them are added to the configure command.
-- |Hook to run before configure command
preConf :: Args -> ConfigFlags -> IO HookedBuildInfo,
-- |Over-ride this hook to get different behavior during configure.
confHook :: PackageDescription -> ConfigFlags -> IO LocalBuildInfo,
-- |Hook to run after configure command
postConf :: Args -> ConfigFlags -> PackageDescription -> LocalBuildInfo -> IO ExitCode,
...
* Everything else
peace,
isaac
