[darcs-devel] Curl build issues

Eric Kow eric.kow at gmail.com
Wed Apr 16 16:38:12 UTC 2008


>  Actually, pointless programming is relaxing, which is why I took up the
>  project.  It's rather encouraging to note that a couple of days of coding
>  can pretty easily surpass the ease of use of cabal (probably largely
>  because I only support ghc).

I'll just point out here that a hypothetical dmake/dconfigure does not
exclude the use of cabal files.  We could hook them as a custom build
method.

I'm guessing the appeal of having a Cabal file (even if what goes on
underneath is not very much Cabal) is that
(1) it would make it easier for us to say what modules libdarcs
exposes (we could still do it the old-fashioned way, but it's no
easier than cabal)
(2) it makes it easier for us to say what Haskell packages we need and
(3) it allows users to do dependency tracking via cabal-install.
Maybe this means we can use more third party libraries without
worrying about making darcs hard to install (tracking down deps of
deps).

I guess some objections might be that (a) darcs is special in that it
needs to be extra-careful about what libraries it uses anyway
(consider the regex case) and (b) we may introduce crazy bootstrapping
issues.  Guess we can't really get away from b no matter what we do,
though.  Don't think Cabal would really hurt us much in that dept.

Shrug...

-- 
Eric Kow <http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/home/Eric.Kow>
PGP Key ID: 08AC04F9


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