Cabal vs base

[Isaac Jones]

Hey Neil.  FYI, we now have a cabal-devel mailing list also for those
interested in getting involved in cabal development.  This mailing
list is still appropriate for user questions or what-have-you, and I'm
sure most of us stil read it :)

"Neil Mitchell" <ndmitchell at gmail.com> writes:

> I'm interested in using Cabal to build the base library, just like any
> other library. Does this have any chance of working? How much work
> would it take?

I thought this already was happening?  At least in GHC, I see
libraries/base/base.cabal.

> At the moment the libraries build script has broken on Windows loads
> of times, and if Cabal was used it would be nicer, less code, and more
> cross platform.

Especially once we get cabal-install working to analyze the
dependencies.

> I'd also like to compile libraries for Hat, Yhc and Catch, and if I
> can reuse cabal to do this that would be great.

Please do!

> If this work was done, would it be possible to reduce the
> installation script for the full haskell.org libraries to get
> library, cabal config, cabal build, cabal install?

With the new cabal-install, you could possibly do:
cd ghc/libraries
cabal-install */*.cabal

(assuming you already have cabal and stuff)

> So just a general question about what needs doing, 

I don't think I understand you completely, so please let me know a bit
more detail.  Cabal is already used for building the libraries, at
least for hugs, and I think for ghc, but perhaps not.  Tweaking the
ghc makefiles is probably necessary if that's what you want to do.

> who is capable of doing it, and what I can do to get it working.

YOU are capable of helping out w/ cabal-install and adding Hat & yhc
support to cabal :)

Paolo and Duncan are leadng the cabal-install effort.

peace,

  isaac