Re: [PATCH 4/7] gnu: Add idris-lightyear.

[David Craven]

> IMO you can push this patch as is and provide an ‘idris-build-system’
> later on, or do the latter first.  Either way is fine with me as long as
> we don’t wait until there are ten users of ‘idris-default-arguments’.
> WDYT?

Regarding that, I think it's harder than it should be to add new build
systems at the moment. I think that adding a new build system requires
a substantial amount of boiler plate.

Would it make sense to have a phase-build-system that could be easily
extended with custom phases and cherry pick from a collection of
generic phases or something like that? Then we could simplify the
gnu-build-system to include only gnu-build-system specific stuff?

This could also be a good time to reinvestigate using gexp's in the
build systems. Would the problem that Danny had with imported modules
compiled not finding libgcrypt be solved by using gexp's?

I'm aware that this would be a substantial effort and maybe it's not
currently that important. But there seems to be interest in also
adding an ocaml-build-system, and the rust-build-system is a work in
progress. Maybe we could ease the transition by having the new build
systems use a phase-build-system as a base, without having to change
existing build-systems and giving some more lead way in experimenting,
since it wouldn't break any existing packages.