Suggestion re altering the build system

[Manuel M T Chakravarty]

In the last couple of weeks I spent a lot of time just trying to compile 
GHC.  With the constantly changing build system, incremental builds fail 
more often than not after new patches are pulled.  And sometimes even 
clean builds don't work.  For example, today (that is Monday morning in 
.au) I could neither build the ghc-ndp branch nor the head pulling the 
ghc sources and packages straight of darcs.

I am maybe in an especially bad situation by working on the head and a 
branch (ghc-ndp), but we sync the branch fairly often (although that's 
been discouraged by the constant build problems).  I am also building on 
MacOS, which once in a while presents its on kinks (eg, readline 
breaking with the change to the Cabal build system until Roman fixed it).

Nevertheless, I don't think I am alone.  For example, not long ago I met 
Andy Gill in #ghc trying to find a version of the head that's fairly 
recent and still builds.

So, let me make a suggestion.  Could the changes to the build system 
maybe done on a branch of the repos and be integrated into the live tree 
in larger intervals?  Then, we'd have the pain in bursts, but less 
often.  I appreciate that this is not entirely trivial as you have to 
branch the packages along with the ghc repo, but the current situation 
is extremely frustrating.

Cheers,
Manuel

PS: You may wonder why I didn't complain about failed builds before if 
it all was so bad.  I simply thought it might be temporary and meant to 
just sit through it.