Shipments in Cabal

[Duncan Coutts]

On Thu, 2005-12-08 at 10:02 -0800, Isaac Jones wrote:
> Krasimir Angelov <kr.angelov at gmail.com> writes:
> 
> > Hello Guys,
> >
> > I have started developing Shipments in Cabal. 
> 
> Awesome!  FWIW, you should probably take a look at the package
> dependency code in cabal-get, and you also might want to look at the
> new cabal-install tool, as I expect that when we ship a cabal w/
> cabal-install, people will use it a lot.  Although having shipments
> makes cabal-install less important.

I also wrote a bit about this issue:

http://haskell.org/hawiki/Cabal_2fMultiPackageDistributables

I started off from the assumption that "shipments" are necessary and
obviously beneficial. However after thinking about it for a while and
thinking through some of the implications (especially on dependency
resolution) I'm not not so convinced that we need shipments as such.

There is certainly a case for making it easier to work with a
system/project that consists of multiple libraries and executables,
however I'm convinced that the cabal package should be the fundamental
unit and that "shipments" should be merely for the convenience of the
developer.

I would certainly like to see better support in Cabal for larger
projects (for one thing I'd love to be able to convert Gtk2Hs to use
Cabal) but I think we should be careful to fully understand the changes
we intend to make to support larger projects.

Duncan