Henrik Nilsson
Well, the non-support for Hugs is an important point. We also wanted support for mixed-language builds, i.e. parts of a system written in C/C++ or Java. We wanted support for installation and building of distributions (source distributions, binary distributions with installation support, RPMs, ...). We wanted support for building documentation of various forms.
I agree that hmake is not intended for most of those tasks. It just builds software written in Haskell.
That said, maybe a mixed make/hmake build system might have been better than our current make-only system, except, of course, that hmake then would be yet another tool the end user would need to install to get going.
You are probably already requiring the end user to install a Haskell compiler/interpreter, a C/Java compiler, and a documentation tool (LaTeX, Haddock, DocBook, whatever).
Many pre-processors are also supported by hmake, and it is easy to add new ones.
How? By scripting hmake through some kind of hmake file? Or by changing the source? The latter would not really be quite good enough in my opinion, since one may want to support non-standard pre-processors for some particular project.
At the moment, indeed you need to change the sources. However, I have been playing for a long time with the idea of detecting/configuring pre-processors externally in much the same way that compilers are currently detected/configured. I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard. If there is enough demand I'll probably do it. Regards, Malcolm