[darcs-devel] Re: darcs patch: Add Cabal files (not feature complete).

[David Roundy]

On Tue, Apr 10, 2007 at 09:10:43PM +0200, Eric Y. Kow wrote:
> > haven't actually looked at the patch.  Does the cabal support replace the
> > makefile? That'd be great, it'd be a bummer to have a distinct mechanism
> > for building documentation, and I don't know how flexible cabal is, in
> > terms of serving as a replacement for make.  Or is the cabal stuff actually
> > rather light-weight, in which case it wouldn't be burdensome? Also, does
> > cabal allow us to represent the fact that darcs depends on unix on unixy
> > systems, but on win32 in windowy systems, and things like that?
> 
> For now, it's completely parallel.  One thing which troubles me is
> getting all the extra features right, like git, etc.  There's also the
> issue of compilation flags, for example, getting all the right
> optimisations.

Indeed.  I'd prefer this didn't go in (except perhaps as an optional means
of compilation) until we are confident that cabal is powerful enough for
our needs (and easy enough that we're able to do what we want).

> It's also extremely lightweight, and extensible via Haskell.  One thing
> I plan to do is to move the stringify code into our Setup.lhs as a
> prebuild hook, so that we won't have to do make src/Context.hs

Hmmmm.  Is cabal smart enough to avoid rebuilding this except when
necesary? I'd hate to have to add make-like functionality to cabal.

> I suspect that the easiest way to use it is to leave all extra
> functionality in the Makefile, but to move the darcs compilation to the
> Cabal.  This will greatly simplify the Makefile, for example, no more
> adding modules to it, and the configure script; no more package checks
> to handwrite.  Furthermore, we can use Conal Elliot's cabal-make
> makefile snippets to integrate the two so that you can continue to just
> use the Makefile and have it call the right Cabal options.

That'd be good.  I *would* want to be sure that we aren't losing any
flexibility in the haskell-code compilation and configuring, as I'd hate to
both take a step backwards in the power of our build system *and* in the
familiarity with many coders.  Cabal is widely used, but not by non-haskell
coders, and I'd hate to lose all the hard work put in by Dave Love to make
sure our configure script, etc, all work on Solaris and other exotic
operating systems.
-- 
David Roundy
Department of Physics
Oregon State University
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