[darcs-devel] Curl build issues

[David Roundy]

On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 09:48:19AM -0600, zooko wrote:
> On Apr 16, 2008, at 8:22 AM, David Roundy wrote:
> >
> >Warning... I don't like cabal, and am unlikely to apply cabalization
> >patches without a decent reason.  I'm not sure what would qualify as a
> >decent reason, but the only reason I could imagine is a libdarcs.
> 
> Would using cabal make the build system more portable to Windows?  I  
> have an issue when building darcs on Windows, which is that the  
> configure script tests whether gcc can use -lz, when really what we  
> want to know is whether ghc can use -lz.  Therefore, on some of my  
> systems, the configure passes (indicating that libz is properly  
> installed), but then the build fails because ghc isn't able to link  
> to libz.

No, cabal doesn't do configure tests.  So it would just remove this feature
of the configure script for all platforms.

> Another thing that might qualify as a good reason to adopt cabal is  
> because it is the de facto standard for Haskell programmers.   
> Hopefully using cabal would increase the number of people like Gwern  
> who are willing and able to help out with the build system.

Yeah, but it's a bad system.  It's worse than what we've got in numerous
ways.  The only thing it has going for it is that it can deal with ghc's
almost-undocumented package system.
-- 
David Roundy
Department of Physics
Oregon State University