Tommy Thorn writes:
> Alastair Reid wrote/a ecrit/skrev:
> > > * import-chasing as part of the spec
> >
> > This is an environment feature not a language feature.
> >
> > What does it mean for GHC?
> > Are you wanting to do away with Makefiles?
> > Makefiles can do an awful lot more than import chasing can
> > and GNU makefiles are very, very short in the normal case.
>
> I use a lot of Makefiles, but why must we use ugly tools with beatiful
> languages? They are especially bad for a novice, just trying to gain
> a little more speed on his Hugs program.
>
> What I'd really like to do is just: ``ghc Main.hs'', and obtain a Main
> executable. For the more advance user (using Green-Card, Happy, and
> whatnot) there should always be the brainless "C-style" way. I fail
> to see why GHC must be so difficult to use for multi file programs(*).
>
It musn't (and shouldn't be). A step in the right direction was Simon
Marlow's ghcmake wrapper script for hiding Makefiles from general
view,
http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/mail-www/glasgow-haskell-users/msg00397.html
This was in response to you championing the rights of non-Makefile
literate users (quite right too!) a while back; perhaps we should
include ghcmake as part of GHC's distribution?
(To make this post not totally GHC-centric, I believe hbc already has
got such a thing).
> /Tommy
> (*): I'm perfectly willing to accept that I'm a clueless newbie, but
> even after having read the manual and studied the code, I wasn't able
> to get a working Makefile. Is it doable in a few easy steps? Mind
> you, that ``ghc -M'' did not cut it: the default rules weren't
> specified.
That's not what the option is for, 'ghc -M' mirrors the behaviour of
'gcc -MD' (and friends) emitting just Makefile dependencies. What
you're suggesting could easily be provided though.
If the Makefile example in the GHC user's guide is wrong/lacking in
features, then please share your experiences with the GHC bugs list
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> so that we can try to fix it.
--Sigbjorn
