cabal: question on compiling build prerequisites

[Bardur Arantsson]

On 2013-12-09 11:00, Henning Thielemann wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 9 Dec 2013, Sven Panne wrote:
> 
>> I thought about a similar scenario recently, and I would like to hear
>> if there is a clean cabal solution for this, too. Ripping out a helper
>> program which has only a single use case (support for the "real"
>> package) and which totally has to stay in sync with that "real"
>> package would not be very nice. It would just be an artifact of a
>> (missing?) cabal feature.
> 
> The question is, how far should this feature reach? What if the
> preprocessor needs a preprocessor itself? E.g. a preprocessor might be
> built using a parser generator, then you need this parser generator as
> build-tool for the preprocessor build-tool.

This just means that the build-tool definition should allow for
recursion, I think. In fact, at least one build system that I know of
supports this in a very general way via recursive project definitions.

(The tool is the somewhat inaccurately named Simple Build Tool/SBT, but
the non-simple nature of it doesn't have anything in particular to do
with this feature.)

Regards,