[Haskell-cafe] Re: ANN: Takusen 0.8

[Alistair Bayley]

>  > However, with ghci (which has a custom module loader and linker, I
>  > think),
>  >  it seems to attempt to link all of the modules in the lib, and
>  > this fails badly if you don;t have every back-end DBMS client
>  > installed.
>
>  > The only way I could find to fix that was to adjust the
>  > build to only include modules that will link successfully (i.e. those
>  > for which you have a DBMS client installed).
>
>  I looked yesterday at a slightly nicer way of doing what you're already
>  doing. We can use flags to turn on/off the various backends. What is
>  tricky is doing that such that the default is chosen automagically.

To be fair, this is arguably ghci's fault. If the loader/linker in
ghci was more like gnu ld, then we could just build all of the
modules, and let the linker handle pulling in the optional bits. But I
have no idea if ghc HQ plan to fix it.

I don't know if there's another use case for this kind of behaviour
that would justify adding it to cabal.

Alistair