Ideas for library infrastructure

[Ross Paterson]

On Tue, Apr 29, 2003 at 01:58:08PM +0100, Alastair Reid wrote:
> It's worth pointing out that the existing GHC Makefiles provide a lot
> of the infrastructure we need.  [...]
> Of course, some changes are needed in the GHC infrastructure to make
> them useful for this purpose.  
>   
> - The most obvious are adding additional targets and hooks so that they
>   work with Hugs and NHC.  (At least for Hugs, this also requires
>   extensions to Hugs to support packages in some way.)

For Hugs, is that the modest extension to search paths you raised?
(allowing a path entry like /path/to/package/directories/* to stand
for all immediate subdirectories.)  There are two cases I can see:

- your source package is built as a binary package or port for some
  system.  All the modules for such packages might as well be stored in
  in a single hierarchy.  The system's package manager should take care
  of overlaps, clean uninstalls etc.  This requires no extensions.

- someone wants to install your source package into their Hugs
  installation.  You want to keep such things separate from those
  managed by the system package manager, and from each other,
  and for that the search path extension would be useful.