[darcs-devel] Curl build issues

David Roundy daveroundy at gmail.com
Mon Apr 21 14:08:00 UTC 2008


On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 5:59 PM, John Meacham <john at repetae.net> wrote:
>  > 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.

Thanks for the encouragement! I've mostly dropped work on franchise,
though.  It can now compile darcs, and has a mechanism available for
extension to building more than Haskell code, but I'm not sure I want
to bother coding in everything needed to build with
latex/latex2html/hevea and all that.  Plus I'd need to implement the
tests for API and functionality workarounds.

And really, there isn't much point unless folks other than darcs were
to start using it, as the autoconf/make build system works very well,
and is friendlier to porters than anything written in Haskell is
likely to be.  I suppose the one real advantage of franchise would be
that it would solve Zooko's issues with our configure tests using gcc
direcly to test for library availability, which fails when running
under cygwin.

David


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