[wxhaskell-devel] cabal install wxcore (and also wxdirect)

[Eric K. <eri...@gm...>]

Hi everybody,

Nice to see wxhaskell making progress!

I was hoping I could jot down some wishlist items for building
wxhaskell...  The big thing on my list is for "cabal install wx" to
"just work".  Right now, you have to

  sudo cabal install wxcore --global
  cabal install wx

which is really quite clunky, especially if you want people to be
able to cabal install stuff which depends on wx

As you know (and the franchise folks may not be aware), our current
cabalisation is a bit of a sham; it just adds some packaging around our
configure script (which is handwritten and not even autoconf-generated!)
and our Makefile.  Would anybody have the time to look into makefile.lib
and see if we can do anything about it?  The ideal, I guess would be to
get rid of our homegrown configure script + makefile combination
altogether.  One thing we could start with is by cabalising wxdirect and
just making wxcore for that.  It seems a little silly having this tool
on hackage that /only/ serves for building wxhaskell (but then maybe one
day it will be useful for working on contribs?)

Another idea to play with is converting our homegrown build system to
use franchise, which may be a better fit for wxhaskell because of
the fanciness of our setup

- franchise:
  http://groups.google.com/group/franchise-haskell/web/home-page

- wxhaskell components:
  http://koweycode.blogspot.com/2008/02/wxhaskell-components-and-news.html

I'm CC'ing the franchise list in case they were interested :-)

Thanks!

-- 
Eric Kow <http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/home/Eric.Kow>
PGP Key ID: 08AC04F9