Idiom: interaction with Cabal

Many of the components of the GHC build system are also Cabal packages, with package metadata defined in a foo.cabal file. For the GHC build system we need to extract that metadata and use it to build the package. This is done by the program ghc-cabal (in utils/ghc-cabal in the GHC source tree). This program reads foo.cabal and produces package-data.mk containing the package metadata in the form of makefile bindings that we can use directly.

We adhere to the following rule: ghc-cabal generates only makefile variable bindings, such as

  HS_SRCS = Foo.hs Bar.hs

ghc-cabal never generates makefile rules, macro, macro invocations etc. All the makefile code is therefore contained in fixed, editable .mk files.