I've been largely ignoring messages about perceived deficiencies in the
current build system, given the consensus is to replace it anyway, but
it seems to me that it has gotten better, not worse, in this respect.
Ignoring messages, apart from contributing to an unfriendly impression,
loses the opportunity to make good use of feedback gained at the high
cost of frustrated users. At least, you'd need to classify messages into
"guaranteed not to be an issue with the new system" and "needs looking
into".
Also, most of the pain comes from changes in build system, incremental
or otherwise, where old files or old user habits interact with new systems.
Time needs to be taken into account as it is what makes old and new
systems interact in each user's setup. Don't ignore issues with the old
system just because there's going to be a new one!-)
I understand that you didn't like investing work into one system
when then there was a decision to back out of it again, but the benefit
of having a maintainer comes from someone fighting all those battles
so that users don't have to!
Almost all generated files are now put in dist* directories, which makes
them easy to clean; and even if you do stop using a dist directory and
it doesn't get cleaned, it's hard to see how files in such a directory
could interfere with the build.
Oh, we'll probably find a way;-)
Also, the existence of libraries/base/GHC/Prim.hs causing problems was
pretty much unrelated to the build system. haddock behaves more-or-less
like ghc --make, so haddocking the base library was picking up
GHC/Prim.hs and GHC was getting confused by it. Short of copying all the
sources into dist/ and haddocking them in there (which, incidentally, I
think would be a good idea, although Duncan isn't keen), any build
system would fail in the same way.
Since Ghc Api clients are mostly Ghcs operating in different modes,
why is haddock using --make when ghc is steered by make/Cabal?
Once again, that is mixing two different build systems.
Wouldn't it be possible to (a) switch haddock to non--make mode
and (b) just re-run every 'ghc <args>' command arising during 'make'
as 'haddock <args> <haddock-args>'?
Claus
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