[Haskell-cafe] A Cabal problem

[Mario Blazevic]

Duncan Coutts wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-05-06 at 09:43 -0400, Mario Blazevic wrote:
>> Trevor Elliott wrote:
> 
>>> Cabal doesn't pass the --main-is option, I believe because it is
>>> specific to GHC.  What you could do is add this flag in the ghc-options
>>> field of your executable in the cabal file, like this:
>>>
>>> ghc-options: --main-is Shell
>> 	That worked like charm, except the two dashes should be one (my 
>> mistake). Thank you.
> 
> Note that hackage will reject packages that use "ghc-options: -main-is"
> with the message that it is not portable. The rationale is that unlike
> other non-portable extensions, it is easy to change to make it portable:
> http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ticket/179
> If you want to argue for supporting this ghc extension and/or implement
> support (possibly with workaround support for the other haskell
> implementations) then please do comment on the above ticket.
> 
> Duncan
> 

	After some experimentation, I've changed my opinion and now agree with 
the current behaviour. I had the impression that every Haskell module 
had to reside in a same-named file. While this appears to be true for 
*imported* modules and GHC (hence my mistaken impression), the Haskell 
98 standard does not specify anything of the sort. In case of the 
top-level module, GHC (as well as the standard) allows it to reside in a 
file of any name. So the only reasonable use for -main-is option, as I 
see it, is to allow multiple small main modules residing in the same 
file, and I guess that's not likely to be encountered in a package.