Re: [wxhaskell-devel] Happy New Year, wxHaskellers

[Jeremy O'D. <jer...@gm...>]

On 5 January 2012 12:15, Eric Kow <eri...@gm...> wrote:

>
> On 4 Jan 2012, at 16:59, Dave Tapley wrote:
>
> > I do like the idea that wxc is a separate project, upon which wxHaskell
> depends, however..
> > When configuring wxcore I use wxc's package info, and so require wxc to
> be installed by cabal, and I assume it is the intention of the wxC project
> to be language independent?
>
> I think that would help.  One hope is that if we had a separate project
> that tried harder to be language agnostic, and which had none of the
> trappings of a Haskell project, we might be able to get more help from the
> wxWidgets team.  Make it look like any other project written in C, the
> basic autotools (or more likely Bakefile as wxWidgets use it), the
> pkgconfig stuff, etc.


I am not so keen on this approach. It seems like ever since I have had
anything to do with wxHaskell, far more time has been spent on build system
issues than on Haskell code or getting new wxWidgets components wrapped.

Don't forget that we started with an autotools-based build system which
never really worked properly for Windows. This meant that the bar for
becoming a wxHaskell developer was unreasonably high.

Now that we have everything in Cabal, it is actually pretty easy for people
to get going, and I would be loathe to loose that advantage.

I accept that Cabal is not an ideal build system, but it does 'just work'
when it comes to cross-platform builds.