Re: -pgmc/a/l default options, other ideas

On Jan 8, 2007, at 8:47 AM, Simon Marlow wrote:

> Peter Tanski wrote:
>> Good point.  There really should be both cc-options/cl-options and  
>> cc- flavour; Cabal should check for consistency (i.e., cc-options  
>> with cc- flavour = cl --> error).
>
> hmm, I still don't see why you would want to specify a cc-flavour  
> in a package description.  Shouldn't the package be independent of  
> which kind of C compiler is being used by the back end?

You're right.  As a build system, Cabal shouldn't need a cc-flavour:  
it should "guess" what platform it is on and use that (many other  
build systems do exactly that).  I still find the combination of cc- 
options and cl-options without cc-flavour somewhat confusing since as  
a normative matter if GHC supports -cc-flavour shouldn't Cabal?  I  
should let the point rest until I have hashed out some real  
alternatives in code and see how they work.

>>> On the other hand, it's too much to expect everyone writing   
>>> packages to come up with all the different flavours of C  
>>> compiler  options, so perhaps there should be automatic  
>>> translation... ewww.   But most packages don't have any cc- 
>>> options, so it's not so bad.
>> The Cabal 'configure' step should handle the automatic  
>> translation...  This is part of the problem for Win-GHC, since  
>> Cabal does not itself  support Windows (it is dependent on the  
>> 'make' system).
>
> Cabal supports Windows just fine!  Cabal doesn't depend on make,  
> unless you ask it to.  The default "simple" build system in Cabal  
> doesn't use make at all, it invokes all the build commands directly.

Definitely, with the caveat that Win-GHC should know how to invoke CL  
even though it won't have full via-C with Haskell code.  Do you know  
whether the Libraries are all built with Distribution.Simple?  I  
could check, otherwise.  As I mentioned in the email-conversation  
yesterday (sorry for the glut), there are Windows-native versions of  
Autoconf, Automake and Make that might be used to keep Cabal working  
in the meantime.  (These Windows-native versions seem to create lots  
of intermediate DOS batch scripts.)

Cheers,
Pete