patch applied (packages/regex-base): Make setup script compileagain after recent Cabal changes

[Sven Panne]

On Saturday 01 September 2007 16:45, Thomas Schilling wrote:
> On Sat, 2007-09-01 at 14:39 +0100, Claus Reinke wrote:
> > [subject taken from cvs-libraries@; discussion directed to libraries@]

There are even more patches sitting on my disk regarding this area, stay 
tuned... :-P

> [...]
> So, could you please exclude Cabal (and stay with me when I say we hope
> to have things stable by the next ghc release), re-evaluate the
> situation excluding anything related to Cabal issues (ie, setup.lhs
> errors), and see if your issue still exists?

The main problem is that I've been hearing the sentence "Cabal is unstable at 
the moment, but with the next GHC release everything will be fixed and 
rock-solid, never changing again, ..." at least for a year now. In my 
experience, Cabal is *the* #1 reason for breaking build for aeons, and this 
is really getting frustrating. When trying to build a GHC RPM at an arbitrary 
point in time, you have an almost 99% chance that it won't work. The GHC 
project has really made a step backwards in this respect, and I hope that 
this will improve again. I really wish back the good old times when "make" 
was king... (Does anybody remember changes in "make"'s basic syntax? I 
don't...)

And while we are at regressions: Although darcs concepts are OK (although 
personally I would have been happier with Subversion's model, you can always 
easily do a 3-way merge for personal development), the performance for 
getting repositories is ridiculous: Due to various obscure things I've 
experienced, partial repositories are not an option for developers, but 
getting complete repositories for GHC + extra libs takes about half a day, 
even when you have a "fat" line to the Internet. The tarball snapshots of the 
repositories are not really an option in the long run IMHO and defeat the 
purpose of a versioning tool. To be usable, a speedup of at least factor 10 
would be required. Is there any hope for this? The aging CVS at least 
scaled...

Cheers,
   S. (going back to the next build failure...)