[Haskell-cafe] hat support in Cabal (was: How to debug GHC)

Isaac Jones ijones at syntaxpolice.org
Mon Sep 5 15:28:32 EDT 2005


Malcolm Wallace <Malcolm.Wallace at cs.york.ac.uk> writes:

> Isaac Jones <ijones at syntaxpolice.org> writes:
>
>> >> 1. Hat requires users to restrict themselves to a certain small subset
>> >> of the standard libraries, and to use hmake
>> >
>> >                                Also the issue of how libraries are
>> > distributed in Haskell is a little bit in flux at the moment, since
>> > Cabal is still being polished.
>> 
>> This doesn't really have anything to do with Cabal as far as I know.
>> Hat comes with pre-translated libraries for a subset of the GHC
>> libraries.  It's true that the libraries that come with the compilers
>> may change in the future, partly due to Cabal, but I don't think this
>> is the reason that Hat doesn't come with all the libraries.  Hat
>> doesn't even use Cabal, AFAIK, but hmake.
>
> Well, the hope is that, eventually, Hat should be able to take any
> Cabal-ised library and transparently build it for tracing.  Or maybe
> it will be Cabal that will support building for tracing as one "way"
> amongst others (profiling, etc).  In any case, the point is that Hat
> pre-dates Cabal and so has no support for it, that Cabal is still
> under development, and that eventually there should be a good story
> for using Cabal+Hat together, but it isn't there right now.

I think the later is the way to go, add a "way" to cabal to build
hat-enabled libraries.  Cabal has all the information, the list of
source files, extensions, which compiler you're building for (does
that matter to hat?).  This would be a great feature to add to Cabal
:)

But we don't really yet have a way to build a set of libraries in a
particular "way".  It's _less_ painful now to build profiling
libraries, but you still have to go through and build each one. Maybe
cabal-get can help with that.

One problem for GHC is that ghc-pkg doesn't have any sense of "way"
afaik... if I build package A without profiling support, and package B
depends on package A, cabal's configure stage for package B can't
detect whether or not A is built with profiling support... well, maybe
it could go look for the profiling libraries or something.  We might
have a similar problem w/ hat-enabled libraries, and maybe slightly
worse... I know that GHC profiling libraries can live alongside
non-profiling versions; if you build package B with profiling, GHC
just looks for the right version of package A's library in a standard
place.

But for Hat, I'd guess we want to keep a separate hierarchy for
Hat-enabled libraries, maybe even a different package database
(hmmm!).  In fact, that's probably what should happen for profiling
and any other "way" which requires that all packages be built the same
"way".


peace,

  isaac


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