[darcs-devel] Curl build issues

John Meacham john at repetae.net
Thu Apr 17 00:59:07 UTC 2008


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? 

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.

> 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


-- 
John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈


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