BuildWrapper/EclipseFP and GHC 7.8

I've been working on some issues related to GHC 7.8 in BuildWrapper and EclipseFP. On the EclipseFP side, mainly the quickfixes are affected, because EclipseFP parses the GHC error messages to offer them, and the quotes characters have changed in the GHC 7.8 messages.

On the BuildWrapper side, things are more complex. Adapting to API changes wasn't a big deal, but it seems that GHC bugs involving the GHC API, static linking and other unknowns cause some things to break. The solution I've found was to build BuildWrapper with the -dynamic flag. But I couldn't upload this to hackage because Cabal thinks that -dynamic is a debug flag (it starts with d). I've sent a bug fix to Cabal, so in the next release that'll be fixed. So if you're using GHC 7.8 and BuildWrapper, you may want to rebuild the executable with -dynamic (uncomment the relevant line in the cabal file).

Note: BuildWrapper comes with a comprehensive test suite (90 tests covering all aspects). So you can always build the tests and run them to ensure everyting is OK on your system.

Happy Haskell Hacking!

Dynamic-cabal to solve dependency hell in BuildWrapper

As I've explained in several places, we have an issue in BuildWrapper (the underlying Haskell program for the EclipseFP plugins): BuildWrapper depends on both the GHC API and the Cabal API. Since GHC itself has a dependency on Cabal, once you've installed GHC, BuildWrapper can only use the same version of the Cabal API that was used by that GHC. Moreover, some Cabal files (setup-config in the dist directory for example) are cabal version dependent (since they only serialize Haskell structures, this is for safety). The net result is that if you install a newer version of Cabal and cabal-install, BuildWrapper still uses the old version, and hence the Cabal library BuildWrapper uses and the cabal-install executable have different versions, and hell breaks loose.

I have looked at solving the issue in GHC itself: GHC does not need to have a dependency to the Cabal API. I had started investigating with help from GHC devs, but it was end of October, and I had understood that GHC 7.8 was to be released in November, so there was no time to do such a change. So I thought I would wait for the next release. But it's now end of December, and GHC 7.8 still hasn't been released. So should we have to wait another year to solve that issue? Gasp!

But then, out of the blue, help came! Benno Fünfstück released dynamic-cabal, with the promise that it would solve exactly this issue! I actually should have had that idea myself, but hey... Basically, dynamic-cabal provides simpler structures than the full Cabal API, and extracts them from the Cabal API via dynamic code generation. The code is generated and ran dynamically using the GHC API. Since the running code itself doesn't depend on GHC, it can use the latest version of the Cabal library, and hence read the setup-config file properly!

I have now rewritten parts of BuildWrapper to use dynamic-cabal, and I only had to add minor enhancements to dynamic-cabal. I have upgraded my own cabal-install to 1.18 and everything works (my GHC still uses Cabal 1.16)!! I'm not releasing that version yet because it will provide some new features for EclipseFP 2.6, but if really you want to give it a try just build it from Github.

So my thanks go to Benno! A big hurdle has been cleared on EclipseFP's path to world domination!

Buildwrapper 0.2.2 released

Hello all, I've just released a new version of buildwrapper, which is one of the backend Haskell executables used in EclipseFP. This is a bug fixing release, addressing some of the issues reported by people. Just install the new version via cabal install or via the EclipseFP cabal packages views.
There is ongoing work on EclipseFP and scion-browser, so a new version of both should hit the shelves pretty soon, in a matter of weeks!

Happy Haskell Hacking!