Cabal vs base

[Simon Marlow]

Esa Ilari Vuokko wrote:
> On 8/9/06, Isaac Jones <ijones at syntaxpolice.org> wrote:
> 
>> "Neil Mitchell" <ndmitchell at gmail.com> writes:
>>
>> > I'm interested in using Cabal to build the base library, just like any
>> > other library. Does this have any chance of working? How much work
>> > would it take?
>>
>> I thought this already was happening?  At least in GHC, I see
>> libraries/base/base.cabal.
> 
> 
> I think the last stopping thing is GHC.Prim - it's generated with by
> invoking ghc/utils/genprimopcode.  Should we move that to Setup.hs
> or what?

We decided not to switch to using Cabal in the GHC build system just yet.  It'll 
no doubt require a fair bit of effort and perhaps some changes to Cabal, and 
it's not on the critical path for GHC 6.6.

Also we have to think about how bootstrapping GHC from .hc files would work - 
Cabal would not be available to do the build, because the target system doesn't 
have a Haskell compiler installed (we have some vague ideas about how to do 
this, but we'll discuss these later).

Cheers,
	Simon