Build system idea

[Roman Leshchinskiy]

On 12/08/2008, at 20:11, Simon Marlow wrote:

> - Extract the code from Cabal that generates Makefiles, and treat it  
> as
>   part of the GHC build system.  Rather than generating a Makefile
>   complete with build rules, we generate a Makefile that just
>   has the package-specific metadata (list of modules, etc.), and put
>   the code to actually build the package in the GHC build system.

Sounds good. It would be nice if the .cabal parser from Cabal could be  
made into a separate, stable library which ghc (and nhc?) could use.

This makes me wonder, though. Wouldn't this model make more sense for  
Cabal in general than the current approach of duplicating the  
functionality of autoconf, make and other stuff? If it works ghc, it  
ought to work for other projects, too. Cabal as a preprocessor seems  
much more attractive to me than as a universal build system.

Roman