[darcs-devel] Curl build issues

Gwern Branwen gwern0 at gmail.com
Thu Apr 17 03:27:36 UTC 2008


On 2008.04.16 08:58:56 -0700, David Roundy <droundy at darcs.net> scribbled 1.3K characters:
> 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.

I don't entirely follow. Cabal may not do configure tests itself beyond the conditional-section syntax (leaving out the issue of the arbitrary Haskell code you could write in Setup.hs, of course), but you can just use a configure script if you need it. Tons of Haskell projects have not found this to be a problem: hmp3 uses a configure script, yi use(d) a configure, pugs uses a configure, wxhaskell uses a configure, X11 uses a configure, hs-plugins uses a configure, and so on.

> > 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

About the only real disadvantage I can see to using Cabal exclusively and scrapping the GNUmakefile completely is that you might have to move the documentation build scripts and testing scripts out to their own executables. Not a big deal; a 'make-doc.sh' is not much different from 'make doc', IMO.

--
gwern
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