[Haskell-cafe] Cabalizing darcs

[Gwern Branwen]

On 2008.04.23 12:26:35 -0700, Philip Weaver <philip.weaver at gmail.com>
scribbled 1.2K characters:
> It looks quite clean (no funny business in Setup.lhs).  I would favor
> using this cabalized version over the other.  Thanks!
>
> So, autoconf/configure generate cryptol.buildinfo from
> cryptol.buildinfo.in.  Did you change configure.ac much?

I had to make a number of changes to configure.ac - the problem was
that a lot of Darcs capabilities get modified through CPP; hence the
darcs.buildinfo, to smuggle exported variables from the configure
script to Cabal and to insert them in the correct fields. But not all
of the necessary information was exported, so I had to fix that.
Straightforward if you understand what you need. But there seems to be
very little documentation on Cabal and buildinfos, so I had to do a
bit of trial-and-error.... (Also, I dunno how you guys do Cryptol so
can't speak to that.)

> And the
> Makefile is no longer needed at all, right?
>
> - Phil

Strictly speaking, the Darcs makefile does a lot of stuff besides just
building and installing - it also generates various forms of
documentation (Haddocks, the LaTeX manual for Darcs), run the tests,
and do quite a bunch of miscellaneous stuff like support for some
Windows installer and Debian package format. Some of this could no
doubt be handled in a pure Cabal framework (ie. I understand Goerzen
has a package which can automatically take a Cabal tarball and make a
Debian source deb), but I was just aiming at the building part. If
that's all you need (like most users), then the makefile isn't needed,
yes.

--
gwern
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