[darcs-devel] Curl build issues

[Gwern Branwen]

On 2008.04.16 17:38:12 +0100, Eric Kow <eric.kow at gmail.com> scribbled 1.3K characters:
> >  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)

This is a major bonus, from my perspective. As it stands, if we wanted to do libdarcs/darcs split, and arcs were cabalized, it could be done in under half an hour or so - basically, you replace 'other-modules:' with 'exposed-modules', and indent a little for library syntax.

Of course, this is a quick-and-dirty method since that would lead to modules like 'HTTP' and 'Crypt.SHA256' being made public; packages and modules already at those names would no doubt be annoyed. So you'd want to do some module renaming and shuffling to, at the very least, place everything under the Darcs.* namespace. This would be the time consuming part.

> (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).

Lennart Kolmodin dropped into #darcs recently, mentioning that he was working on getting Darcs-2 into Gentoo. I happened to mention I was at that moment hacking away at the cabalizing; he seemed quite happy to here it.

So it wouldn't just be users who benefit.

> 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>

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