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  • Glasgow Haskell Compiler
  • GHCGHC
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  • #8244
Closed
Open
Created Sep 06, 2013 by Niklas Hambüchen@nh2Reporter

Removing the Cabal dependency

GHC depends on cabal, which is so far has been problematic many times, for many reasons.

A few discussions include:

  • http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2013-September/108746.html
  • http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2013-March/000821.html

GHC uses only a very small part of Cabal, in these files:

./compiler/ghci/Linker.lhs
./compiler/main/Packages.lhs
./compiler/main/PackageConfig.hs
./compiler/main/Finder.lhs

plus 1 file for ghc-pkg: ./utils/ghc-pkg/Main.hs (see http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2013-September/108750.html for details).

It was proposed that either

  • the package format could be a plain specification without direct code dependencies
  • the Cabal package could be split off into Cabal-the-build-system and a minimal part to describe the package DB to be shared by Cabal and GHC

The Cabal part that is used is in only a few modules of Distribution.* while the remaining majority of the Cabal-the-library package is not used (e.g. none of Distribution.Simple.*).

Decoupling GHC and Cabal seems to be a public desire, yet there are some problems with these approaches. Let us discuss them in this ticket.

Trac metadata
Trac field Value
Version 7.6.3
Type Bug
TypeOfFailure OtherFailure
Priority normal
Resolution Unresolved
Component Compiler
Test case
Differential revisions
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CC mail@nh2.me
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