[Haskell-cafe] Cabal (was: Compilers)

[Duncan Coutts]

On Sat, 2008-11-29 at 17:49 -0800, John Meacham wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 30, 2008 at 01:37:20AM +0000, Thomas Schilling wrote:
> > So that's over 20000 SLOC, but, of course, for a more powerful tool.
> > So I presume the 4x more code remark by John was about the Makefile
> > rules to implement something similar to the Simple build system part.)
> 
> No, I was refering to 'mk'. which you can download a unix port of here:
> 
> http://cminusminus.org/code.html
> 
> I chose it since there are a variety of make implementations out there,
> and GNU make attempts to be compatible with all of them and then some.
> 'mk' contains a superset of the functionality (with a slightly cleaned
> up syntax)  of what we all generally think of as portable 'make'. 

There's hardly any code in Cabal that corresponds to mk/make, since we
call out to ghc --make. Most of the code in Cabal is for lots of other
features.

Of course if Cabal's "Simple" build system did contain more code for a
dependency framework like mk or make then it'd be a lot more capable.
However building a decent one is easier said than done. We don't just
want to re-create make, we want something better.

Duncan