Shipments in Cabal

[Simon Marlow]

I just made some changes to my proposal:

http://haskell.org/hawiki/Cabal_2fAggregatePackages

Mainly I made it so that the sub-packages don't have to be in a
subdirectory, this means it will be easier to tar up the aggregate
package.

On 09 December 2005 14:19, Krasimir Angelov wrote:

> For the end user the presence of shipment isn't important.
[snip]
> The shipment is more important for the developer.

yes, exactly what I said!

[snip]
> I will be lucky with Simon's proposal too. It will allow to build
> automatically all packages but I think that it is more complicated. At
> least everything that have to be added to Cabal for this proposal will
> be required in my proposal too. The aggregate package description is
> in fact just a replacement for the shipment description which Isaac
> proposed.

the point is that an aggregate package is just a package; we don't need
a separate concept for it.

> I don't think that it is required to have a separate description.

The problem with putting all the .cabal files in a single place is that
you then have to distribute the whole set of packages together; and it
becomes some kind of larger entity for which we need a name
("shipment").     Shipments will be visible at the Hackage level,
because Hackage will have to know the set of packages contained in a
shipment.

I don't think we need to do this.  All that is needed is an empty
package that depends on all the others.  Hackage doesn't need to learn
anything new, neither do the other tools.

> I have to write an another aggregate package. Will it be distributed
> separatelly in Hackage?

Yes - but that's exactly how other package systems work.  It's flexible
and simple.

Cheers,
	Simon