Hugs' build system

[Neil Mitchell]

Hi

>    * I think we should abandon version names like "Sep2006" and go for the
> usual numerical even/odd numbering scheme. This more consistent with the rest
> of the world and makes it easier for tools to determine e.g. which version is
> newer. I am not sure if we have ever released a numerical version, so I
> propose to call the current version 0.9 (odd, because it is a developer
> version) and bump it to 1.0 for the next release.

I like Sep2006, I think its cute, and I would actually rather the rest
of the world moved to this system. However, I don't care enough to be
the person who stops this.

>    * I think that Hugs should finally be moved to darcs instead of CVS, the
> current mix of version control systems is a bit obscure and we need darcs for
> the libraries, anyway. I have no former experience in doing this conversion,
> but I think others on this list have, so I'd prefer not doing this for myself
> (or at least get some hint/tricks/... from others who have done it before).

Definitely! Malcolm Wallace has done this a couple of times, on
nhc/Hat and others, and probably knows how to do it well by now.

> I don't know exactly how WinHugs is currently being built, but I guess that
> there are no fundamental reasons why the above changes could seriously break
> WinHugs development. Otherwise: Neil, please yell! :-)

I build the libraries using the makefile combo etc. on Mingw. That
stage often breaks, since its rarely tested - anything to make it more
reliable would be welcome. To build the libraries I typically delete
my CVS tree and do a completely clean checkout, anything else goes
wrong even more.

I build the executables and installer using a small batch file and
calls to Visual Studio - this is very easy, and I'm happy to keep this
outside of the main Hugs build logic.

Thanks

Neil