[Haskell-cafe] Compilers

[John Meacham]

On Sat, Nov 29, 2008 at 05:10:24PM -0800, Don Stewart wrote:
> > 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.
              

This is indicative of problems with some factions of the cabal community
in general though. That somehow the idea of getting a package into cabal
was more important than the package actually working.  Like it or not,
the cabal project has accumulated some supporters who have an agenda
where promoting cabal is more important than the actual value of cabal
to a project. This has made for a very hostile enviornment to be a
developer in.

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

DrIFT is maintained by me and already can be used with the ~1000 other
libraries on hackage.


        John


-- 
John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈