Build system idea

[Sittampalam, Ganesh]

John Meacham wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 27, 2008 at 10:18:59PM +0100, Duncan Coutts wrote:

> > So I accept that we do not yet cover the range of configuration 
> > choices that are needed by the more complex packages (cf darcs), but
I 
> > think that we can and that the approach is basically sound. The fact

> > that we can automatically generate distro packages for hundreds of 
> > packages is not insignificant. This is just not possible with the 
> > autoconf approach.

> This is just utterly untrue. autoconfed packages that generate rpms, 
> debs, etc are quite common.

Can you give an example of how this works? I would expect autoconf
scripts to be completely missing the necessary metadata to do this.

> As for programs written in haskell, I don't want people's first
> impression of haskell being "oh crap, I gotta learn a new way to
> build things just because this program is written in some odd language
> called 'haskell'" I don't care how awesome a language is, I am going
> to be annoyed by having to deal with it when I just want to
> compile/install a program. It will leave a bad taste in my mouth.
> I would much rather peoples first impression be "oh wow, this
> program is pretty sweet. I wonder what it is written in?" hence
> they all use ./configure && make by design rather than necessity.

On the flip side, ./configure && make is completely useless on
native windows (i.e. without cygwin, mingw or the like) platforms,
whereas cabal works everywhere GHC does.

Cheers,

Ganesh

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