[Haskell-cafe] Compilers

[Don Stewart]

john:
> On Sat, Nov 29, 2008 at 11:41:03PM +0100, Daniel Fischer wrote:
> > Great, nothing I don't already have, so download the source tarball, unpack 
> > and
> > ./configure --prefix=$HOME
> > checking for a BSD-compatible install... /usr/bin/install -c
> > checking whether build environment is sane... yes
> > ... more configure output ...
> > checking for drift-ghc... no
> > configure: error:  DrIFT not found get it from 
> > http://repetae.net/computer/haskell/DrIFT/
> > 
> > Huh?
> > dafis at linux:~/jhc/jhc-0.5.20080307> which DrIFT
> > /home/dafis/.cabal/bin/DrIFT
> > dafis at linux:~/jhc/jhc-0.5.20080307> DrIFT --version
> > Version DrIFT-2.2.3
> 
> Oh golly. I never put DrIFT on cabal, apparently whomever tried to
> cabalize it didn't include the ghc driver script, and also appeared to
> just drop the documentation from the package altogether. It is things
> like that that make it very hard to get behind cabal, why was DrIFT
> crippled just so it can be put on cabal? If cabal wasn't powerful enough
> to compile DrIFT, and we already had a perfectly good way of compiling
> it, why the need to shoehorn it in and cause this problem? sigh.

Sounds like a problem with the packaging of DrIFT for Hackage, not with
Cabal per se. This can happen if the package author doesn't do the
conversion from ad-hoc make systems to cabal -- metadata that was
implicit in autoconf+make can be lost.

Perhaps the DrIFT maintainer could package it correctly, so that it can
be used with the ~1000 other libraries on Hackage.

-- Don