On 8/3/05, Ross Paterson
Proposals:
1) New field extra-tmp-files, a list of extra files to be removed by setup clean, beyond those that can be deduced.
What is the use case for this? Temporary files are either created by tools Cabal already "knows" about (GHC, hsc2hs, etc.), or they are created by hooks. It seems like Cabal should know enough to clean temporary files created by the tools it invokes. If the user writes a hook that generates temporary files, then they should also write a pre/-post-clean hook to delete them. Alternative proposal: Modify Cabal so that all temporary files are generated in the scratch directory, and "setup clean" merely deletes the scratch directory. Hooks that generate their temporary files into the scratch directory will have them deleted automatically by "setup clean," and hooks that generate temporary files anywhere else (and in the source tree in particular) are discouraged and not directly supported (though the package author could still use a pre/post-clean hook to delete them manually).
3) New field data-files, a list of files to be copied to a place where an executable can find them (e.g. template-hsc.h for hsc2hs): Hugs: the directory containing the Main module GHC/Windows: the directory containing the executable GHC/Unix: /usr/local/share/<exename> plus a new function in System.Directory to return the name of this directory. That would address Dimitry's requirements in
How about allowing directories too, which would be copied recursively? What would the paths in data-files be relative to? How would one reference a file that is generated by a hook into the scratch directory? For example, imagine that wxHaskell was Cabalized, and that its source distribution was to include the .hs files generated from the wxdirect tool. BTW, what exactly is a "source distribution?" I think a very reasonable definition is "A source distribution can be built with nothing more than a Haskell compiler/interpreter that supports the required language features and that has the correct packages and libraries installed" In particular, a source distribution would never require any preprocessors. Regards, Brian