haskell / haskell/cabal

Support wildcards in c-sources and cxx-sources?

Open
#9,248 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
type: enhancement
Dominant language
Haskell
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Forks
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Merged PRs (30d)
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Description

**Describe the feature request**

Support wildcards in c-sources and cxx-sources, e.g.

```
c-sources: cbits/*.c other_cbits/**/*.c
```

**Additional context**

Some time ago, I created a library with extensive C source codes - not the best decision. Today, I stumbled upon some intriguing comments in the GHC rts.cabal file:

https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/blob/master/rts/rts.cabal.in#L665

```
-- I wish we had wildcards..., this would be:
-- *.c hooks/**/*.c sm/**/*.c eventlog/**/*.c linker/**/*.c
```

(If there is already any other issue with this, please tell me or just close this one. I only found this related one: https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/206)

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Research direction

Start by tracing how Cabal handles the c-sources and cxx-sources fields, then compare the requested behavior with the linked GHC rts/rts.cabal.in example. Done means wildcard patterns such as cbits/*.c and other_cbits/**/*.c are accepted and expanded consistently for both fields, with coverage in the relevant tests.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
haskell
Domain
build-system
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
38/100

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