Idiom: interaction with Cabal
Many of the components of the GHC build system are also Cabal
packages, with package metadata defined in a foo.cabal file. For the
GHC build system we need to extract that metadata and use it to build
the package. This is done by the program ghc-cabal (in utils/ghc-cabal
in the GHC source tree). This program reads foo.cabal and produces
package-data.mk containing the package metadata in the form of
makefile bindings that we can use directly.
We adhere to the following rule: ghc-cabal generates only
makefile variable bindings, such as
HS_SRCS = Foo.hs Bar.hsghc-cabal never generates makefile rules, macro, macro invocations etc.
All the makefile code is therefore contained in fixed, editable
.mk files.