Version control systems

Matthias Kilian kili at outback.escape.de
Mon Aug 11 17:22:29 EDT 2008


On Mon, Aug 11, 2008 at 04:17:59PM +0100, Simon Marlow wrote:
[...]
> As for Cabal - we had a thread on cvs-ghc last week, and as I said there
> we'd love to hear suggestions for how to improve things, including wild 
> and crazy ideas for throwing it all away and starting again.  However, as 
> I explained, there are good reasons for the way things are done now, the 
> main one being that the build system for packages is not written twice.

Well, at least the Makefile creation was a step (the first step?)
into the wrong direction, IMHO. I'll run a GHC build to get some
of those generated Makefiles and followup on cvs-ghc, but for a
starter, Cabal shouldn't know anything about implementation-specific
internal build systems; instead it should rely only on it's own
metadata.  Implementation-specific stuff (such as how to run the
compiler) should be supplied by the implementation, not by Cabal.

I see more and more workarounds for workarounds for an unmaintainable
(and unusable) build system, and after the latest discussions about
git vs. darcs, maintaining GHC-specific branches of libraries etc.,
I think I'll just drop maintainership from all GHC-related OpenBSD
ports until the GHC build system chaos settles down a little bit.

Ciao,
	Kili


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