[Haskell-cafe] Compilers

[Don Stewart]

john:
> On Sat, Nov 29, 2008 at 09:00:48PM -0500, Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH wrote:
> > On 2008 Nov 29, at 20:02, John Meacham 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.
> >
> >
> > Blaming Cabal for Audrey doing a quick-and-dirty translation (because  
> > she didn't have a whole lot of time to spend online and wasn't really  
> > familiar with Cabal or Hackage) is just digging for excuses.
> 
> Hmm? This wasn't done by Audrey, all the hackage/cabal stuff she has
> done for my projects has been with my blessing. (and thanks)
> 
> And creating a crippled version of something you wrote and passing it
> off as the original, in a way that clearly breaks things for other
> people definitely is something to get upset about. And no, that is not a
> technical problem with cabal itself, but it does make me worry about the
> motivations of some in the project when that sort of breakage seemed
> like a good idea to someone.

Looks like it was packaged by gwern when he was trawling the archives
finding releases that weren't on Hackage -- and yes, several of the
things he uploaded were incorrectly packages in some way or another. 

If I grab drift from Hackage though,

    $ cabal install drift

    Resolving dependencies...
    Configuring DrIFT-2.2.3...
    Preprocessing executables for DrIFT-2.2.3...
    Building DrIFT-2.2.3...
    Linking dist/build/DrIFT/DrIFT ...
    Installing executable(s) in /home/dons/.cabal/bin

And it runs well enough for the other projects I've used it on.

    $ DrIFT -V    
    Version DrIFT-2.2.3

Is the cabal distribution just missing extra scripts? There's a fine
line between "packaging" in the distro sense, that cabal does (where
only metadata is added), and an actual fork. In this case, it looks like
only metadata was added, so it's no different to any number of distro
packages.

Are you interested in ensuring the cabal file accurately describes the
package as you wish it to be installed?

-- Don