environment variables for ghc

[Tomasz Zielonka]

On Wed, Mar 09, 2005 at 11:55:11AM -0800, Frederik Eaton wrote:
> > I am still not convinced that it is a good idea to add such
> > functionality to GHC. Do you want to persuade developers of
> > every program you use to add similar feature?
> 
> Is the perceived difficulty of that task an argument against improving
> ghc?

No, it's about avoiding unneccesary complexity.

> I agree that the case you're presenting is indeed more difficult, but
> I don't think you're doing the estimations right for the one at hand.
> The cost and annoyance of perhaps tens of thousands of people adding
> and remembering to maintain wrappers named 'ghc' somewhere in their
> path to accomplish this simple task (after scrounging in the
> documentation to find that ghc for some reason fails to be like many
> other compilers, a nontrivial cost in itself since the lack of
> environment variables isn't specifically documented) - or simply not
> doing so, and typing in -package-conf hundreds of times as I have
> done, because they may not have write access to the main package.conf
> - I think outweighs the cost of one person, once, adding central
> support for environment variables, a bit of documentation in the man
> page, perhaps a ghcbug program if we want super-detailed bug
> reports...

Are you volunteering to be that person? ;-)

Best regards
Tomasz