[ANNOUNCE] Shaking up GHC

[Edward Z. Yang]

I mean, it would be nice if ghc --make was reimplemented using
Shake, but there are a few problems (most notably the use of
.shake metadata store) which make it hard to be bug-for-bug
compatible with the old make.

Edward

Excerpts from Ben Gamari's message of 2016-01-23 10:45:50 -0800:
> Tuncer Ayaz <tuncer.ayaz at gmail.com> writes:
> 
> > On 23 January 2016 at 18:16, Herbert Valerio Riedel wrote:
> >
> >> On 2016-01-23 at 17:58:12 +0100, Tuncer Ayaz wrote:
> >>
> >> [...]
> >>
> >> > My suggestion, and what I'd expect, is to make Shake part of GHC's
> >> > included lib, just like process or xhtml.
> >>
> >> please don't; the only reason we include process and xhtml because
> >> we *have* to. The less we *have* to bundle, the better.
> >
> > If there's a good way in 8.x (with new Cabal and Shake) to avoid
> > bundling, while using Shake for ghc --make, then I'm all for it. My
> > concern is that it has to be as simple as it's currently to install
> > ghc on a random Linux distro, in order for someone to use a Shakefile.
> > I want more Shakefile users :).
> 
> I'm not sure I follow. Edward's --make support is a front-end plugin;
> as far as I know there has been no discussion of shipping it with
> GHC-proper. It merely makes use of the new front-end plugin facility.
> Perhaps I'm misunderstanding something here?
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> - Ben