Build system idea

[Simon Marlow]

Roman Leshchinskiy wrote:

> Of course there should be a standard build system for simple packages. 
> It could be part of Cabal or a separate tool (for which Cabal could, 
> again, act as a preprocessor).
> 
>> GHC is a special case: we already need a build system for other reasons.
> 
> I agree. I just don't think that adding a full-fledged build system to 
> Cabal is the solution. In my experience, huge monolithic tools which try 
> to do everything never work well. I much prefer small, modular tools. A 
> Haskell-based build system is an interesting project but why does it 
> have to be a part of Cabal?

Hmm, but you said above "there should be a standard build system for simple 
packages.  It could be part of Cabal...".

Cabal has two parts: some generic infrastructure, and a "simple" build 
system (under Distribution.Simple) that suffices for most packages.  We 
distribute them together only because it's convenient; you don't have to 
use the simple build system if you don't want to.

I think perhaps you're objecting to the fact that the "simple" build system 
isn't so simple, and we keep adding more functionality to it.  This is 
true, but the alternative - forcing some packages to provide their own 
build system - seems worse to me.

Cheers,
	Simon