Unix Dir for .hi Import Files

[John Meacham]

on somewhat of a tangent, i was running into problems with where both
nhc and ghc place their hi files when attempting to compile from a
read-only filesystem, the standard autoconf setup (as used in DrIFT
http://repetae.net/~john/computer/haskell/DrIFT) works almost perfectly
except the .hi files always seem to be placed in the same directory as
teh source files rather than with the .o files as would seem to make
sense. This is necisarry when compiling from a read-only filesystem, or
when building many binaries from one source tree with different tools or
with different options.  my current workaround is to add an explicit
-i%srcdir% which does not solve the problem, but allows the build to
continue in most cases.
	John

On Sat, Jun 08, 2002 at 01:27:52PM +0100, Malcolm Wallace wrote:
> Ashley Yakeley <ashley@semantic.org> writes:
> 
> > I'm not sure if there's any standardisation effort or intent for .hi 
> > files, or whether they are likely to remain GHC-specific for the 
> > forseeable future,
> 
> Each Haskell compiler has its own .hi format.  An idea has been
> floated that there should be a standard 'minimal' .hi format, but
> it is not clear that it would be useful in practice, since the
> extra stuff the compiler normally puts in there must be for a reason.
> 
> > but I was wondering if there should be a standard
> > UNIX directory to put them in. For instance:
> > 
> > /usr/share/haskell-import/Org/Org/Semantic/HBase/Basic/Trivial.hi
> > 
> > ...much like C has "/usr/include/".
> 
> This is very difficult, because not only does the .hi format vary
> between compilers, but even with GHC alone it is utterly dependent
> on the version of the compiler.  Hence, GHC's .hi files must
> go in directories like
> 
>     /usr/local/lib/ghc-5.00.2/imports
>     /usr/local/lib/ghc-5.02.3/imports
> 
> etc.
> 
> However, you can organise your own libraries as a 'package' if you
> like, and keep all the .hi files that belong with it together.
> The GHC documentation has more info on how to build a package.
> (Nhc98 has also adopted a simplified version of GHC' package
> mechanism, to appear in the next release.)
> 
> Regards,
>     Malcolm
> _______________________________________________
> Libraries mailing list
> Libraries@haskell.org
> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/libraries
> 

-- 
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
John Meacham - California Institute of Technology, Alum. - john@foo.net
---------------------------------------------------------------------------