> I saw in a recent CVS commit log that the -syslib flag in some
> Makefiles was being changed to -package. Tell me this rumour isn't
> true!
Er... yes it's true. We realised that there were several concepts of
"bundles of modules" in GHC that needed unifying:
- recompilation checking between bundles of modules
isn't necessary most of the time. For instance,
you don't want to check whether the prelude changed
every time you recompile a module in your program.
- in a DLL-enabled world, references to functions in
a different "bundle" require an indirection.
- it's useful to bring bundles of modules into scope
in one go. That's what the -syslib option used to
do, as well as adding the library name to the linker
command line.
So we (actually Simon PJ) unified all this into one concept, which we're
calling a package. When you're compiling a module to be part of a package,
you give the -package-name <blah> option. When you want to bring a package
into scope, you give the -package <blah> option.
We also plan to have a way to install & remove packages in an existing GHC
installation.
Comments? Ideas for better names etc?
Cheers,
Simon
