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.lhsplus 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 | |
| BlockedBy | |
| Related | |
| Blocking | |
| CC | mail@nh2.me |
| Operating system | |
| Architecture |