on when to build ghci libs in cabal

[Ross Paterson]

On Sat, Jul 30, 2005 at 01:04:46PM -0700, Isaac Jones wrote:
> Henning Günther and Duncan Coutts / the Gentoo team have sent me a
> patch to move creation of ghci libs to the build phase rather than the
> register phase.  It makes more sense there and should be somewhat
> better for debian and gentoo.
> 
> Though Duncan points out that maybe some ppl want to build the ghci
> libs during register because it could save room in a binary
> distribution (like debian and rpm).  Any opinions here?

I'd favour doing all the building in the build phase.  And part of the
purpose of binary distributions is to trade space for time.

> Also, I noticed the "FIXME" that mentions the -x flag is only
> supported on some platforms; what effect will this have on platforms
> that don't support it?  Will they be broken during build?  What about
> platforms where we know the ghci libs don't work, like MacOS; will
> this patch cause building to break?

fptools/ghc/utils/ghc-pkg/Main.hs has 3 #ifdef'd versions, all with
-x, though.

> The patch adds a couple extra configure options,
> --enable-library-for-ghci / --disable-library-for-ghci.  I'm sorta
> thinking of just having one option "--disable-interpreter-libs" or
> something to make this seem more generic, though at the moment, it
> still only makes sense for a combo compiler / interpreter build (that
> is, --ghc).  I'll be happy to add this to the manual once we settle on
> a flag.  Do we ever really need to disable it anyway?

I don't see the point of any option in this case.