Re: cabal design

On Fri, Aug 19, 2005 at 10:11:52AM -0700, Isaac Jones wrote:

Frederik Eaton writes:

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On Mon, Aug 15, 2005 at 08:52:18AM -0700, Isaac Jones wrote:

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Frederik Eaton writes:

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1) Cabal files can have different names, yet only one can exist in a directory. I've been told that the reason for the former is that Isaac wants to support building multiple packages in a directory, but currently the feature isn't implemented, so only one cabal file is allowed.

Certainly, it would be a nice feature, but more importantly it seems that it would require some API changes or additions which should be made sooner rather than later. Is there a document describing how it would work? Is there a roadmap, a schedule for implementation?

I'm not so sure that the change is very big at all... it should just be a matter of adding a feature to allow libraries to register themselves "in-place" or something... then compute the dependencies between the packages, build them in order, install the libraries you'll need in-place, then compile the programs.

The problems come up where a package might need to actually be in the install location in order to work. Hopefully that's not too common.

This sounds rather vague. For instance, how does it interact with configure/make based packages?

If they conform to the cabal standard, providing configure, build, and install steps, then they are built exactly the same. Can you be more specific about your question?

What I meant is, if a 'make'-based build depends on a cabal package being installed in a temporary location, how do we communicate to the 'make'-based build what that temporary location is? There needs to be some standard mechanism and it is important to facilitate some sort of discussion about it so that the right standard mechanism is agreed upon. It's not trivial, there is a package database, a base for library files and executables, and these have to be communicated to different kinds of compilers... I expect that even how things will work with standard cabal packages will not be trivial.

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What do you think about putting a TODO list linking to designish documents on the wiki, so that people can flesh these plans out and comment on them there?

Sure. Feel free to add a wiki page for this. There's a TODO list in the darcs repository, but it may not be understandable by anyone but me; it still might be a good place to start.

Maybe we'll need your help on the TODO list part. I'm willing to contribute ideas once the structure

I caution you, though, on spending too much time making plans and designs and not much time writing code; the problem is usually that we have plenty of ideas about what needs to get done and not enough coders. The code base is pretty manageable, so if you want to help out, just pick something you think needs to get done, or ask me what is most important and start working on it :) I usually ask for help on this list when something comes up.

I caution you on the opposite. Cabal is very format and protocol-heavy. I imagine that much of the work has gone into documentation and mindshare, in which case it becomes very important to keep people informed and working together. Suggesting that individuals need to contribute patches unilaterally before anything will happen seems counterproductive to me, at least when it comes to some of the larger parts. On a meta-tangent, if we could be discussing things on a wiki, rather than a mailing list, then I think discussions could go a lot faster. For instance: person A says something, person B asks for clarification, person A amends what he says and deletes person B's request. On a list you have 3 messages, on a wiki you have 1. So asking someone to "go read the thread" doesn't sound so ridiculous anymore. If it were a wiki with email notification capabilities, then it would be even better since it could evolve in real time. This is the sort of thing I'm advocating. Partly because I think it would be good for Cabal, partly because I want to do the experiment. Only if other people think it's a good idea though.

Something that you could spend a few hours on is getting the test suite to run conveniently on other people's computers, and figuring out how to get Hugs to pick up changes directly from the current directory during testing.

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3) The way that a 'cabal' package with a 'configure' script should be built is not easy to determine. There are some very useful programs (http://toastball.net/toast/) which build and manage packages of all kinds automatically, by running 'configure' with a local prefix, etc. How should these tools be extended to work with 'cabal' packages? With some 'cabal' packages, the user is supposed to run 'configure' first, and then 'runhaskell Setup.hs'. With other 'cabal' packages, the user is supposed to just run 'runhaskell Setup.hs', and this will run 'configure' automatically. Is there a right way? Is there a way to distinguish the two types of packages automatically?

What packages require you to run configure by hand? (snip) I don't know of any packages off-hand.

Whew

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I think my friend who wrote "toast" may have found one, but he may also have just liked 'configure' better. Anyway, it's good to know that there is a standard. It might be good for the manual to mention explicitly that configure/make are always run by Setup.hs and not vice-versa.

Here's a good example; the manual is in the darcs repository, doc/cabal.xml, I think. Just go ahead and add that and send me a darcs patch :)

I've attached a patch.

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4) Cabal's inability to let users specify package.conf-s other than the user or global package.conf

I think the gentoo guys were going to implement this for us; in any case, it's a subset of 1). This should be pretty easy; the only question is whether we should have a --in-place or a --package-conf=... Where in-place would choose a "standard" one (./packages.conf or something). The reason I'd prefer the former is that not all systems _have_ an idea of a package.conf file, so --package-conf= would make no sense for most compilers. I try to avoid that. The reason for the later would be if there's some use-case that --in-place does not work for.

Is it really a subset of (1)? I don't think it is.

I think a --package-conf= would be very nice. If it is not supported by the compiler, then an error should be generated.

In a way, the problem isn't "lack of support" but a different model of finding packages... It's not like a compiler extension that one system supports and one doesn't; this flag breaks abstraction between compilers in a way that --in-place does not. I haven't heard any use cases where --in-place won't work.

Well, we're talking about two different features here. I want to be able to specify an arbitrary location. You want to be able to specify the current working directory. Not the same thing, is it? I think it should be possible to specify an arbitrary location, at least for ghc.

(snip)

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5) It seems that there should be a way to build multiple packages which depend on each other, in such a way as that the first package doesn't have to be installed for the second package to be built. In other words, perhaps something like a dummy installation as in #4 is called for. I have seen mention that support for building multiple packages is planned, but how? When?

This is the same as 1.

Well, not if they aren't in the same directory. Again, we need to have more explicit details about how things are planned to work.

Hackage is the tool here; it's still almost ready. It has 19 module dependencies and is a pain to bootstrap. We've written about it here & there, but if you can't dig up concrete information, come onto #haskell and ask Lemmih what's up.

I was thinking something like WASH, where the packages are in different directories, but they aren't registered in some sort of central database. BTW, I find that Haskell modules are simple enough to maintain and merge that sticking these 19 hackage modules into 1 might not be too bad of an idea.

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6) I think it should be easy to use 'cabal' for development; however, when I am building a package with multiple executables, every 'build' seems to re-link each executable, regardless of whether it needs re-linking or not, which is quite slow.

I'm not sure why ghc --make re-links executables every time.

For libraries, I think we could use support from ghc to tell whether we need to re-link the library; ghc goes through and skips stuff that doesn't need to get built, and then we link everything in the library; if ghc could somehow let us know that nothing needed to get built, that would be very helpful; otherwise, someone has to write the logic to go through and check it all just like ghc does. This code should be out there somewhere.

Isn't there a way to get ghc to emit Makefile fragments which solves this problem? Not that solving it in ghc wouldn't be good as well.

Relying on Make isn't any good for us for the simple build infrastructure; it needs to be more portable than that.

Really? Surely every platform has some basic 'make' installed. And just parsing out the rules can't be that hard. Frederik -- http://ofb.net/~frederik/