On 30 July 2005 21:05, Isaac Jones wrote:

Henning Günther and Duncan Coutts / the Gentoo team have sent me a patch to move creation of ghci libs to the build phase rather than the register phase. It makes more sense there and should be somewhat better for debian and gentoo.

Though Duncan points out that maybe some ppl want to build the ghci libs during register because it could save room in a binary distribution (like debian and rpm). Any opinions here?

Also, I noticed the "FIXME" that mentions the -x flag is only supported on some platforms; what effect will this have on platforms that don't support it? Will they be broken during build? What about platforms where we know the ghci libs don't work, like MacOS; will this patch cause building to break?

The patch adds a couple extra configure options, --enable-library-for-ghci / --disable-library-for-ghci. I'm sorta thinking of just having one option "--disable-interpreter-libs" or something to make this seem more generic, though at the moment, it still only makes sense for a combo compiler / interpreter build (that is, --ghc). I'll be happy to add this to the manual once we settle on a flag. Do we ever really need to disable it anyway?

Definitely a good thing. The ghc-pkg --auto-ghci-libs was only ever a hack, because it doesn't make any attempt to find the right way to build GHCi libs on the current platform; Cabal can do a much better job. I'm happy we're shifting this burden onto Cabal. I'm not sure you would ever want to disable it; it should be completely transparent. Arguably GHCi should be able to use the .a files directly, but we've never gotten around to implementing that. It'll be a non-issue when we start using shared libraries, too. Cheers, Simon