Thursday, August 17, 2006

Neil vs Cabal

Today I've been trying to get into cabal, since it seems a pretty cool thing, and it looks like the way forward.

As I've been doing this, trying to compile various projects using Cabal, it turns out that I spent all day encountering bugs! I've hit things that seem a bit curious in loads of programs, sent off patches, reported bugs, asked for clarification etc. Hopefully this will be fixed at some point soon, after enough people have bashed through it.

In particular, to try and get this going better, I'm going to try and keep the HEAD versions of various projects compiled regularly with Cabal on Windows - and then probably distribute the binaries as part of my Haskell on Windows drive.

I'm also trying to get Hoogle working properly with Cabal, since thats going to be the future way of building it, probably.

Which brings me on to a final question about the Hoogle license, what should it be? Currently Hoogle is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License. Nothing else in the Haskell world is, so its not particularly sensible that Hoogle is. My basic thoughts are GPL vs BSD. What do people think one way or the other?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Regarding GPL vs BSD the choice is not hard but you have to make it:

- Do you want other people to be able to take your code and ship binaries of it, probably modified, without ever giving the sources back ?

If you answer "yes", then you want BSD, if you answer "no", then you want GPL.

Personally I wouldn't release any code under BSD, it is my work and I don't want people to just use it without giving back (either the modified source or money).

Neil Mitchell said...

The answer to that is "no", and in general I would choose the GPL license.

However, most Haskell stuff is under the BSD, and some Haskell developers are employed by Microsoft so might find it harder to engage with a GPL Hoogle.