On Thu, Aug 17, 2006 at 03:29:00PM +0100, Duncan Coutts wrote: > On Thu, 2006-08-17 at 14:50 +0100, Neil Mitchell wrote: > > Hi, > > > > First off, being a windows user, having a configure/build separation > > seems a bit unusual. > > It's more for developers I'd say. It means you can configure once and > then build, modify code, build, modify code etc etc without having to > reconfigure each time.
That makes a lot of sense for (say) GNU autotools, where a fairly straightforward configure check for a few libraries can take a minute or so. With a faster configuration system (such as cabal), it may not be necessary. I was very impressed with SCons when I ported some C code to use it rather than autotools -- the scons version configured and built (in one step, 'scons' with no arguments) in less time than autotools took to ./configure :) > > In amongst all this waffle, it also checks for Happy - an absolute > > essential build dependancy. It doesn't find that, like it doesn't find > > plenty of other things, and continues straight along. Then when I try > > to buid, it fails. > > It would be great if it worked out what was needed and only checked for > those, and then all failures could be reported. perhaps the developer could specify (in the .cabal file or so) which tools are actually required to build; I'm guessing this would require extra fields (not covered by build-depends or extensions). Perhaps something like build-tools or required-tools/optional-tools? Conrad. _______________________________________________ cabal-devel mailing list cabal-devel@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/cabal-devel
