Build system idea

[Simon Marlow]

Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH wrote:
> On 2008 Aug 28, at 22:00, Sterling Clover wrote:
>> We do have, although not with easy access, an additional declarative 
>> layer "built in" 90% of the time as configuration as type signature.
> 
> Sure?  I think it's easier than you think:  someone's already written 
> code to extract the information from .hi files (and indeed ghc will dump 
> it for you:  ghc --dump-iface foo.hi).  In theory there could be a 
> master dictionary of these hosted on hackage, collected from each 
> package's own dictionary, and a given package's dependencies could be 
> computed with high accuracy from it.

It's a good idea, but conditional compilation makes it quite a bit harder.

Cheers,
	Simon