On Wed, 2005-07-27 at 22:32 +0100, Duncan Coutts wrote:
If cabal packages can be adapted to 'native' packages easily (be that windows MSI installers, .deb .rpm etc) then it will allow Haskell libraries/programs to be distributed much more easily and to a wider audience.
I agree.
I think this aspect of Cabal has not got enough attention yet. Perhaps the people who package haskell programs/libs for the major systems (Debian, Gentoo, Fedora, MacOS X, FreeBSD, Windows) should get together and think about our requirements.
I've been using autoconf and automake for buddha, which though ugly at times, provides a nice path to making packages for various unixy systems (generally I think because this is the standard GNU way of doing things). However, I haven't been able to migrate this over to cabal. One thing that is not clear in my mind is where cabal ends and autotools begin. There seems to be some overlap. Personally, I would love to throw away all the autotools stuff, but I'm not sure if I can easily replicate everything in cabal alone. Is it a goal of cabal to be able to avoid autotools? Bernie.