Version control systems

[Manuel M T Chakravarty]

Matthias Kilian:
> 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.

Thanks for demonstrating my point...

Complicated build infrastructure and lack of portability used to be a  
big problem for GHC in the past.  Over the last years, the situation  
got much better (to a large extent due to SimonM sanitising the  
makefile-based build system).  Why are we so keen to throw it all away  
now?

Manuel