On 29 July 2005 21:18, Duncan Coutts wrote:
However an IDE wants even more. It wants to be able to rebuild individual files quickly (so dependency tracking is required and linear build scripts are out). It will want to provide a GUI interface for changing build system parameters (which means that the build system has to be declarative, not scripted). And no doubt there are other things too.
The point is that fulfilling these requirements might be possible for some imagined future version of the "simple" build system, however if the Cabal interface is extended to stipulate these same features then it would exclude most other build system implementations.
My feeling is that the requirements for incremental building should be part of the simple build system. It's not quite true now, because we allow arbitrary hooks into the simple build system. So tools like Visual Haskell only work properly if you don't use hooks. This is one reason why being more explicit about whether a package uses hooks or not would be useful. Cheers, Simon