Duncan Coutts
I think I'm claiming that developers want support for developing systems as a unit but distribution can be as a collection of components rather than as a unit.
Do you believe it is a bad idea to expect that Cabal be the appropriate tool for developing systems as a unit? Maybe Cabal should do just one thing, and one thing well, package components of systems into the smallest units available for distribution. I had been thinking of Cabal as a development tool as well as a packaging tool, similar to autoconf/automake, but perhaps Cabal is really meant to be similar to rpmbuild and dpkg-buildpackage. Maybe thinking of it as a development tool was an error on my part. For my application, I suppose I could use autoconf/automake to develop the software, install the executables, build a Cabal package description, and then use it with Cabal to make the library available as a package. Is this usage more inline with your intentions? John