new Library Infrastructure spec.

[S. Alexander Jacobson]

On Wed, 2 Jun 2004, Isaac Jones wrote:
> Here are some more issues you're scheme will have to deal with:
>
> 1) Marcus Makefile.  He's important to us; he's a hard-core haskell
>    developer and we want to support him.  How does he go about calling
>    through to the "make install" command?

I thought this proposal was an alternative to
"make install."  Are people doing things with
makefiles that can't be done using StaticSetup?

If they are, do these things involve multiple
compilers/interpreters that may or may not be
installed together on a given machine?  If yes,
then perhaps they are better served with a more
generic install functionality that interacts with
Haskell via the more restricted StaticSetup.

> 2) If you allow executables to be installed, you'll have to watch out
>    for attacks which replace "ls" or something.  I guess you could
>    have a warning for any package which tries to overwrite an existing
>    file, though this may happen a lot for upgrading a current library.

But typically it would happen all within the same
directory so there it should be possible to offer
the user the option to accept all updates to a
particular directory.

Simply telling the user in which directories
updates may be happening is a big plus.

> 3) There is some grey area between the Angela and Marcus use cases
>    where she can perform extra preprocessing steps and configuration
>    steps within the context of Setup.lhs (since she has all of Haskell
>    at her disposal.)  In your scheme, there is no space between Angela
>    and Marcus. You're either in or out when it comes to utilizing
>    Distribution.Simple.

I'm not sure I follow here.  Nothing stops you
from chaining/recursive StaticSetup...

-Alex-

_________________________________________________________________
S. Alexander Jacobson                  mailto:me at alexjacobson.com
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