state of the cabal (preprocessors)

[Isaac Jones]

Hi Henrik,

Your outline of how the Yale build system treats preprocessing made
sense to me, except for the special case of delaying CPP for Hugs
until installation.  I think that's where my confusion came in.  What
advantages is there in delaying CPP until installation time?

> Thus, the same pros and cons would hold for binary versus source
> distribution both for compilers and interpreters. If one wants the
> flexibility of choosing the Haskell system and the operating system
> platform at installation time, then one needs a source distribution.
> If one is interested in installing a library for a particular
> Haskell system on a particular platform with the least amount
> of fuss (and without a complete tool chain), then one can pick a
> "binary" distribution if available.

Cabal almost supports this trade-off now; we don't really have a
binary distribution as-such, though we plan to support it... we build
into a temporary directory and install just moves the built stuff into
place and does the registration.  The only missing part is the
creation of a binary tarball or something.  We don't have a
platform-independent way to do this yet.  For sdist all we do is call
'tar' with the zip option, but this is completely broken on windows so
far.  I'll happily accept patches that'll make this code more generic.
That should make 'bdist' easy to implement.


peace,

  isaac