Broken head

[Simon Marlow]

Ian Lynagh wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 08, 2007 at 04:19:29PM +0100, Simon Marlow wrote:
>> I've just made GHC's Cabal into a branch.
> 
> FWIW I think this is a mistake. It'll make changing Cabal as part of
> changes to the larger system harder, and increases the global amount of
> effort necessary.
> 
> Also, I think Cabal patches would benefit from being checked with GHC's
> testsuite.
> 
> I don't think that Duncan's argument that requiring validation of Cabal
> patches would hamper new developers is valid, as their patches will
> always be being applied by someone like Duncan, who could do the
> validation.

I'm not especially keen on having another branch either, but the 
alternative is that patches to Cabal must pass GHC's validate before being 
pushed, and that puts the burden on the Cabal developers to fix GHC and the 
core packages when breaking changes are made to Cabal - that doesn't seem 
right.

OTOH it's true that the GHC build is a good testcase for Cabal (it looks 
like Cabal is broken right now, and testing with GHC would have discovered 
that).

Duncan, any thoughts?  Do you prefer the branch, or would you be happy to 
run GHC's validate before pushing to Cabal?  This would affect people like 
Ross who push directly to Cabal too.

Cheers,
	Simon