Specifying dependencies on Haskell code

[David Roundy]

On Sat, May 03, 2008 at 02:51:33PM +0100, Ian Lynagh wrote:
> On Fri, May 02, 2008 at 09:55:32AM -0700, David Roundy wrote:
> > On Sun, Apr 20, 2008 at 09:22:56PM +0100, Duncan Coutts wrote:
> > > 
> > > We settled on a fairly traditional model, where one specifies the names
> > > and versions of packages of Haskell code.
> > 
> > Do you actually have any precedent for such a system?
> > 
> > I know there is a long history of the autoconf-style approach being
> > successful.  Can you point to any success stories of the approach chosen
> > for cabal?
> 
> LaTeX does things like
>     \RequirePackage{longtable}[1995/01/01]

I wouldn't call LaTeX a build system, although it's certainly a wonderful
typesetting system.

> According to http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/PythonEggs, with
> python eggs you do things like
>     from pkg_resources import require
>     require("FooBar>=1.2")

>From what I can tell, python eggs aren't a build system either, but rather
a binary package format.

> According to http://blogs.cocoondev.org/crafterm/archives/004653.html,
> with Ruby gems you do things like
>     s.add_dependency("dependency", ">= 0.x.x")

It seems that a ruby gem is also a binary package.

> (URLs found by googling for "how to make a <foo>")
> 
> Those were just the first 3 things I thought of.
> I don't know what you would consider a success, though.

I'd definitely call LaTeX a success, have no idea about gems or eggs (which
I'd never heard of before this email), but none of these are build systems,
so far as I can tell.
-- 
David Roundy
Department of Physics
Oregon State University