cabal-setup

[Isaac Jones]

Simon Marlow <simonmar at microsoft.com> writes:

> Following discussions a while back:
>
>    http://www.haskell.org//pipermail/libraries/2006-January/004815.html
>
> there was some concensus (although not unanimous) that Cabal's user
> interface should be a wrapper program that runs Setup.hs.  I've
> implemented a first cut at this, see the attached Cabal patch.  It
> addresses this ticket:
>    http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ticket/63

The somewhat bigger vision is to as mentioned here:
http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ticket/65

is to add cabal-setup and cabal-get to the cabal tree.  We'd like to
thin out cabal-get so that it's small enough to include w/ cabal.
Cabal-get will take over some of the functionality that cabal-install
was meant to do, and will be layered on top of cabal-setup.

Does everyone like the name cabal-setup?

So this looks good to me so far!  I think duncan started work on
something very similar, so I've CC'd him and perhaps he can let us
know if he has anything to add.

> I'm sending it here rather than committing directly, because I imagine
> there will be some discussion about whether this is the right
> thing. I'm pretty convinced this is the right way to go: it solves the
> Cabal versioning problem, and it frees the programmer from having to
> write a boilerplate Setup.hs file.  It's a step on the way to
> supporting building of multiple packages.
>
> Look at the patch, tell me what you think.  You'll need a completely
> up-to-date Cabal from darcs to build it.

I looked at it a bit and it looks fine.  I'm leaning toward keeping
all multi-package stuff in cabal-get (maybe it should be called
cabal-install or something, since it should also work on local files)
and keeping cabal-setup very thin, as you have it now.

Thoughts?

peace,

  isaac