[jhc] [Question] Should jhc support Cabal? Or should use only yaml?

[Henning Thielemann]

On Sun, 17 Mar 2013, Kiwamu Okabe wrote:

> Should jhc support Cabal? Or should use only yaml?

I have once updated JHC support in Cabal because I did not like to 
install a lot of packages manually. Cabal-install can install a lot of 
packages in one go. But actually I had to edit all involved Cabal files.

Cabal is designed to work with many compilers but if only GHC cares about 
working with Cabal then this won't work. One central problem is that the 
package 'base' shipped with GHC is actually a 'ghc-base' and cannot be 
easily ported to compilers like JHC. I think the correct solution would be 
a 'base' package that provides real basic functionality that all Haskell 
compilers provide. This base package could be implemented using compiler 
specific packages like ghc-base and jhc-base on different compilers but it 
should expose the same API on all compilers. With such a 'base' package it 
would be really simple to compile a Cabal package on either GHC or JHC.

I think the real missing feature of GHC and JHC is re-exporting a module 
from another package. With this feature we could re-export a module from 
ghc-base or jhc-base as module of 'base'.