Unbundle Cabal from GHC
Recently, Duncan made it so that GHC proper does not depend on Cabal (so it is just ghc-pkg that is the user-facing executable which links against Cabal). We should now seriously consider unbundling Cabal from GHC, so that the default global database we provide does NOT include Cabal.
Pros:
- Distributions will be more likely to take point version releases to Cabal, as they no longer have to finesse updating Cabal without updating GHC as they have now
- Stack is (improperly) coupling the version of Cabal they build with the release of GHC; while they should fix this, unbundling Cabal would also give them more flexibility with picking LTS packages.
Cons:
- Bootstrapping Cabal/cabal-install becomes modestly harder. Fortunately, cabal-install is already pretty obnoxious to bootstrap, so SOP is to just distribute binaries for this, in which case things are as easy as before.
- We wouldn't be strictly adhering to the Cabal spec, which requires that the compiler always be able to build the Setup executable.
- ghc-pkg would have to be statically linked
Trac metadata
| Trac field | Value |
|---|---|
| Version | 8.1 |
| Type | Task |
| TypeOfFailure | OtherFailure |
| Priority | normal |
| Resolution | Unresolved |
| Component | libraries (other) |
| Test case | |
| Differential revisions | |
| BlockedBy | |
| Related | |
| Blocking | |
| CC | dcoutts, hvr |
| Operating system | |
| Architecture |