Broken head

[Manuel M T Chakravarty]

Simon Marlow wrote,
> Manuel M T Chakravarty wrote:
>> Running validate on the current (Mon Aug  6 12:42:45 EST 2007) head, 
>> gives me
>>
>> /opt/local/bin/ghc -H64m -Onot -fasm -I. -Iinclude -Rghc-timing -O 
>> -fasm  -ignore-package Cabal -ignore-package filepath -I../libraries 
>> -fglasgow-exts -no-recomp    -c Distribution/System.hs -o 
>> Distribution/System.o  -ohi Distribution/System.hi
>>
>> ../libraries/Cabal/Distribution/System.hs:14:10:
>>     Not in scope: `System.Info.os'
>>
>> This is on MacOS compiling with GHC 6.6.1.
>>
>> Duncan, did you run validate before pushing all these recent cabal 
>> patches?
> 
> We shouldn't expect Cabal developers to run GHC's validate when pushing 
> patches.  The right thing to do is for GHC to use a branch of Cabal 
> (subset only, so no conflicts), and only push patches to GHC's branch 
> after a validate.
> 
> This entails some extra overhead to the development model.  Thoughts?

Depends on the Cabal developers, I guess.  Making sure that GHC's 
build doesn't break might be a good regression test for Cabal.  If 
they don't like that, using a subset-branch sounds fine (something 
like packages/Cabal-ghc).

However, this raises the general question of GHC's core packages. 
Cabal might be a special case, but generally validate is only 
moderately useful (as we just saw) unless the obligation to run it 
applies to all core packages of GHC.  (I don't think it makes sense 
to use subset-branches for all core packages.)

Manuel