ghc configure

[Claus Reinke]

>> Mainly this is due to modularity: many of the library packages can be built
>> entirely separately from GHC, so their configure scripts are designed to be
>> standalone.

library packages are haskell packages, and much of the configuration data
should be common (plus a few package-specific checks). would it be possible
to have a "configuration package" with nothing but the common checks? then
every package, and ghc itself, could depend on that package being there, and
every package configure could modularly use the information from that package.

such a package might also encode the information in haskell, for use in cabal?
perhaps creating such common info should be a cabal feature, factoring common
checks from the package configure files to cabal, which would need access to
some shared configuration file to store and retrieve the info? that way, once
you've got cabal built on a platform, there'd be no need to repeat the common
suspects of tests in individual configure files?

just thinking out loud,-)
claus