[darcs-devel] Curl build issues

[Gwern Branwen]

On 2008.04.16 17:59:07 -0700, John Meacham <john at repetae.net> scribbled 1.7K characters:
> On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 07:22:20AM -0700, David Roundy wrote:
> > On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 01:47:28AM -0400, Gwern Branwen wrote:
> > > So, my recent efforts to Cabalize Darcs have been going fairly well. I
> > > now have a setup which allows me compile from an sdist tarball through
> > > Cabal and not the GNUmakefile. But there are some puzzling problems and
> > > changes.
> >
> > 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.
>
> Indeed. I think cabal is the wrong thing here. I really dislike language
> specific build systems in general. I mean, imagine if the perl folks got
> up in arms because ghc didn't use CPAN simply because it uses perl in
> the evil mangler?

I'm not entirely sure I follow. Shouldn't the analogy be, 'imagine if the sh folks got up in arms because darcs didn't use autotools simply because it uses sh in the test scripts?' :)

> The fact darcs is written in haskell shouldn't be a burden on people
> that just want to use it and expect ./configure && make install to do
> what they want. No matter what, it is annoying when programs differ from
> the norm and people's first exposure to haskell shouldn't be annoyance
> at having to look up some wacky new build system.

I don't think it's a big deal. Cabal comes with GHC and has for some time now; if you don't have such a GHC, your problems are bigger than Autotools vs Cabal. In addition: I don't think most people install from source, but rather binaries. Even the source-based distros would prefer cabal builds, I suspect. The only situation in which it'd be a problem is if you had a fellow who managed to install GHC, but somehow didn't have access to a package system with darcs also supplied in it (seriously, didn't most distros package GHC initially just to get darcs available?), and wants to compile by hand the darcs source.

> > On the other hand, I've recently been playing with writing a build system
> > in Haskell, which might be just the ticket for darcs.
>
> Excellent. Build systems are complicated and interesting projects.
> Whatever the next big thing in build systems will be, it will require
> some unique insight to be truely attractive. If any community can
> germinate the seed of such an insight, I think it will be the haskell
> one. I'd hate to see innovation stifled by an artificial need to use
> cabal when so many other choices exist.
>
>         John

If you're interested in novel build systems, have you heard of Nix? <http://nixos.org/index.html>. I haven't had time to install and try it, alas, but reading the papers makes it sound really awesome and quite different from the Autotools paradigm or Cabal.

(Incidentally, they seem to like Cabal.)

--
gwern
media continuous Vauxhall II NCCS NSWT NSG stakeout SUBACS SNS
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