Cabal interface changes proposal

[Simon Marlow]

On 26 November 2004 05:29, isaac jones wrote:

> I like the idea of adding a layer on top of the current cabal to add
> "shipments"...  this would solve the problem of packages like gtk2hs
> and wxhaskell mentioned by Duncan Coutts, and allows us to keep the
> core cabal simple.  Since it won't affect the core interface, I'll
> just push that on the stack and worry about it later.
> 
> Krasimir suggested that a single cabal package should only have one
> executable, but I don't agree.  I can see the reasons for keeping a
> one-to-one correspondence between a cabal package and a Haskell
> package, but I actually really like the way cabal treats executables
> right now. It's much simpler than libraries since it doesn't require
> a registration step or anything.  It just needs to know where to find
> main and what to call the binary.  As Duncan and Simon pointed out,
> multiple libraries is actually a more complicated story.

Personally I think moving multiple executables up to the shipment layer
would be conceptually simpler, but it's not that big a deal.  You're the
boss!
 
> I'll go ahead and perform the other changes mentioned.  Sound OK?

Sure.  Sorry I haven't pushed back my changes yet, still trying to hack
GHC around with the new package story.  It's a lot more involved than I
thought, and I'm taking the opportunity to do some cleanup in GHC at the
same time.  Also I need to update Cabal to talk to GHC's new ghc-pkg
tool, which uses the InstalledPackageInfo syntax for packages.

Cheers,
	Simon