"#!..." (Re[2]: cabal configure screw-up)

[Ross Paterson]

On Sat, Aug 27, 2005 at 02:20:36PM +0100, Duncan Coutts wrote:
> On Sat, 2005-08-27 at 09:02 -0400, Seth Kurtzberg wrote:
> > I would suggest that, while configure does solve a problem, it isn't
> > the best way to solve the problem.  A properly abstracted and layered
> > implementation of O/S specific calls, with each environment supported
> > by an implementation file, is much closer to "doing the right thing."
> 
> I think the problem here is not the configure philisophy but its
> implementation using standard unix tools. That obviously doesn't work on
> windows.

I don't think that even that is a problem.  In a world of dozens of
varieties of Unix running on dozens of architectures, plus a handful
of other os/arch combinations (widespread though one of them is), it
is efficient to use existing Unix tools to handle the vast majority of
cases, with special treatment for the few exceptions.  One could redo
autoconf in Haskell, but why bother?