Version control systems

[Simon Marlow]

Manuel M T Chakravarty wrote:

> As far as I am concerned, building GHC is turning into a big mess.  We 
> discussed ways to improve it again, BUT I'd rather not see it getting 
> any messier before it gets better.  Hence, please let's have a complete 
> plan that we are convinced will work before making any more changes.
> 
>> As for Cabal - we had a thread on cvs-ghc last week, and as I said 
>> there we'd love to hear suggestions for how to improve things, 
>> including wild and crazy ideas for throwing it all away and starting 
>> again.  However, as I explained, there are good reasons for the way 
>> things are done now, the main one being that the build system for 
>> packages is not written twice.
> 
> Yes, we need cabal for packages because we don't want two build 
> systems.  However, this does not justify the use of Cabal outside of 
> libraries/.  Nobody explained to me why that was necessary.  Why change 
> all the rest of the build system.  What is the benefit for the ghc project?

GHC is a package, just like any other.  The GHC package was the main reason 
we still had a lot of the old infrastructure for building packages still in 
the build system, so there was a compelling reason to switch the compiler 
itself to Cabal, at least.

It's true that this change wasn't all win.  We gained in some places and 
lost in others - the build system is more unfriendly to developers now, as 
opposed to people just building GHC, and that really is something we need 
to address.

> To be honest, if you ask me, I'd go back to the old makefile based 
> system and remove Cabal from everywhere except building of the library 
> packages.

I wouldn't object to dropping the use of Cabal for other tools in the build 
tree; the reasons for using it elsewhere are certainly not as compelling as 
for packages.

Ian, I realise this means backing out a lot of the work you've been doing 
recently, and it would mean that we'd lose a lot of time in the runup to 
6.10.1, but perhaps it's a step that we need to take to get us back on the 
right track again?

Cheers,
	Simon