RFC: changes to -i flag for finding source files

[Simon Marlow]

On 30/05/14 11:10, John Meacham wrote:
> On Fri, May 30, 2014 at 2:45 AM, Daniel Trstenjak
> <daniel.trstenjak at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Well, it might not be terribly surprising in itself, but we
>> just have quite complex systems and the not terribly surprising
>> things just accumulate and then it might get surprising somewhere.
>>
>> I really prefer simplicity and explicitly.
>>
>> If a central tool like GHC adds this behaviour, then all other
>> tools are forced to follow.
>
>
> Well, I just proposed it as an alternative to some of the other ideas
> floated here. A command line flag like -i would definitely be ghc
> specific and inherently non-portable.

Just to clarify this point, what I proposed was not intended to be 
compiler-specific, because it would be a change to the hs-source-dirs 
field of a .cabal file, and implemented in whatever way each compiler 
wants to do it.  In the case of GHC the hs-source-dirs are just wrapped 
in -i flags.

Still, I'm not planning to push the change into GHC because (a) changes 
are needed in Cabal and a few other places, (b) opinion was divided, and 
(c) it's not a big enough win.

JHC's semantics would also need changes in Cabal, incidentally, for the 
same reason: supporting 'sdist' (and possibly other reasons that I've 
forgotten).

Cheers,
Simon