[Haskell-cafe] Re: Configurations proposal

[Brian Smith]

On 10/24/06, Duncan Coutts <duncan.coutts at worc.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> On the other hand, in Gtk2Hs I know one case where we do this. We have a
> Graphics.UI.Gtk.Cairo api module that is only included if Gtk was built
> against Cairo. In any case it could be faked by using cpp to just not
> export anything rather than not having the module exposed at all. So
> it's not clear that it's worth banning. Or maybe making it slightly
> harder is worth it so that people don't get in the habit.


Couldn't you split this into Gtk and Gtk-Cairo packages, where the latter is
only built if Cairo is available? Similarly, in your GUI example, couldn't
you have seperate foo and foo-gui packages, and only build the foo-gui
package if the GUI libraries are available?

Otherwise, how can you say "I depend on the Gtk package being built with
Cairo support" and "I depend on the GUI portion of the foo package?"

In general, optional groups of modules should be split off into separate
packages, and there should be a way of building a bundle of related packages
together (just like one can build a group of related executables together
already).

Regards,
Brian
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/attachments/20061024/0399a530/attachment.htm