dumb cabal question

[Isaac Jones]

The reason to combine them is that the point of abstraction between
the compilers / interpreters lives in areas like "preprocess this
file", "build this file", "install this library", not in operations
like you mentioned:

> There would be operations such as: compile a file into an object
> file (may be a no-op); link a bunch of object files into a package;
> install a package into the following package database; create an
> empty package database; merge two package databases; find
> dependencies of a module. And options like: use the following other
> packages, search for packages in the following package database.

Each of these operations would be a no-op for Hugs, and yet the
abstraction layer that Cabal provides works quite well for Hugs.  I
think that if we had built a standard command-line interface between
compilers, GHC and Hugs would have almost disjoint operations, and
Cabal would still have to perform the same amount of work, since it
couldn't actually use this interface to get its job done.

peace,

  isaac