RFC: include a cabal-install executable in future GHC releases

[Johan Tibell]

On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 12:57 AM, Herbert Valerio Riedel <hvr at gnu.org>wrote:

> On 2014-01-21 at 20:22:48 +0100, Ganesh Sittampalam wrote:
> > I feel this blurs the roles of GHC and the Platform.
>
> IMO, that's a weak argument, as the roles are already blurred:
>
> GHC comes with `haddock`, `hp2ps`, and `hpc` executables which could be
> provided by the HP instead. Moreover, GHC ships with a set of base
> libraries (which, and thus effectively GHC forces 20 or so packages
> (fixed to specific package versions) into the HP and takes away
> authority from the HP release process. But now the difficult to explain
> thing is that GHC also bundles the library part of CABAL but
> deliberately leaves out CABAL's frontend tool `cabal-install` only to
> justify the existence of the HP a bit more? :-)
>

Cabal is part of GHC's build process and GHC uses data types from Cabal.
That's why it's there. It's not because we want Cabal to be included (just
like we don't want to ship those libs.) These are technical limitations.
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