[Haskell-cafe] Cabalizing darcs

[Philip Weaver]

On Wed, Apr 23, 2008 at 4:49 PM, Gwern Branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2008.04.23 12:26:35 -0700, Philip Weaver <philip.weaver at gmail.com>
>  scribbled 1.2K characters:
>
> > It looks quite clean (no funny business in Setup.lhs).  I would favor
>  > using this cabalized version over the other.  Thanks!
>  >
>  > So, autoconf/configure generate cryptol.buildinfo from
>  > cryptol.buildinfo.in.  Did you change configure.ac much?
>
>  I had to make a number of changes to configure.ac - the problem was
>  that a lot of Darcs capabilities get modified through CPP; hence the
>  darcs.buildinfo, to smuggle exported variables from the configure
>  script to Cabal and to insert them in the correct fields. But not all
>  of the necessary information was exported, so I had to fix that.
>  Straightforward if you understand what you need. But there seems to be
>  very little documentation on Cabal and buildinfos, so I had to do a
>  bit of trial-and-error.... (Also, I dunno how you guys do Cryptol so
>  can't speak to that.)
>
Trial-and-error was my experience with buildinfo files, too.
>
>  > And the
>  > Makefile is no longer needed at all, right?
>  >
>  > - Phil
>
>  Strictly speaking, the Darcs makefile does a lot of stuff besides just
>  building and installing - it also generates various forms of
>  documentation (Haddocks, the LaTeX manual for Darcs), run the tests,
>  and do quite a bunch of miscellaneous stuff like support for some
>  Windows installer and Debian package format. Some of this could no
>  doubt be handled in a pure Cabal framework (ie. I understand Goerzen
>  has a package which can automatically take a Cabal tarball and make a
>  Debian source deb), but I was just aiming at the building part. If
>  that's all you need (like most users), then the makefile isn't needed,
>  yes.
>
So do you feel like this process yielded an easier to maintain build system?
>  --
>  gwern
>  BLACKER Loin JAVA anthrax AG Zemin The Internet Sayeret 3P-HV
>