The current build of the platform has grown over the years to a somewhat convoluted collection of shell scripts, makefiles, autoconf, and some custom Haskell. It is further complicated by three distinct stages: making the source distribution, building the packages, bundling for distribution. Lastly, I suspect that each distribution (Mac, Windows, and n × unix-like) has it's own path through these stages.

I've done some amount of rework on the process over the last two years, but I'm thinking it is time for wholesale replacement. I'm considering using Shake to replace all three stages as one build. Distributions could choose to either re-cast their process into this Shake program, or work from the source distribution.

The source distribution currently contains scripts and other bits for generically building the platform from source. I currently have no way to know which parts of those bits people rely on for their distributions. This transition would substantially change what is shipped with the source release.

Packagers & Those of you that build the platform from source:

Can you tell me which of these three directions for the source distribution you'd like:

Bare: Just the package sources and a .cabal file, than you.
Scripted: Like the current distribution, shell/make/autoconf scripts that build the platform for some idealized unix-like system.
Programmatic: Include a Haskell program (perhaps Shake based) that builds the platform

I'm interested in hearing how people use the source distribution, and/or if people use the repo directly to build. If I hear crickets, I'll take that as free-reign to hatch evil schemes!

— Mark