On 2013-12-09 11:00, Henning Thielemann wrote:
On Mon, 9 Dec 2013, Sven Panne wrote:
I thought about a similar scenario recently, and I would like to hear if there is a clean cabal solution for this, too. Ripping out a helper program which has only a single use case (support for the "real" package) and which totally has to stay in sync with that "real" package would not be very nice. It would just be an artifact of a (missing?) cabal feature.
The question is, how far should this feature reach? What if the preprocessor needs a preprocessor itself? E.g. a preprocessor might be built using a parser generator, then you need this parser generator as build-tool for the preprocessor build-tool.
This just means that the build-tool definition should allow for recursion, I think. In fact, at least one build system that I know of supports this in a very general way via recursive project definitions. (The tool is the somewhat inaccurately named Simple Build Tool/SBT, but the non-simple nature of it doesn't have anything in particular to do with this feature.) Regards,