The current use of the 'Fast' and 'Production' flags is both inconsistent and
redundant. It's inconsistent, because users are allowed to specify both '-fFast
-fProduction' at the same time -- thereby enabling two contradicting features.
The flags are redundant, because Cabal allows users to specify '-O0' at
configure time, which is essentially the same as '-fFast'. Since 'Production'
is just the opposite of 'Fast', this means that neither flag is needed.
I have seen some other programs do this, and think it's pretty cool. Means
you can test wherever it's deployed, as well as at build time.
My other reason for doing it is less happy. Cabal's handling of test suites
sucks, requiring duplicated info, and even when that's done, it fails to
preprocess hsc files here. Building it in avoids that and avoids having
to explicitly tell cabal to enable test suites, which would then make it
link the test executable every time, which is unnecessarily slow.
This also has the benefit that now "make fast test" does a max speed build
and tests it.
Stopped checking the assistant flag for flags like webapp and xmpp,
because cabal disables the assistant if the other flag's dependencies
cannot be satisfied.
Been meaning to do this for some time; Android port was last straw.
Note that newer versions of the uuid library have a Data.UUID.V4 that
generates random UUIDs slightly more cleanly, but Debian has an old version
of the library, so I do it slightly round-about.
The expensive scan uses lookupFile, but in direct mode, that doesn't work
for files that are present. So the scan was not finding things that are
present that need to be uploaded. (It did find things not present that
needed to be downloaded.)
Now lookupFile also works in direct mode. Note that it still prefers
symlinks on disk to info committed to git, in direct mode. This is
necessary to make things like Assistant.Threads.Watcher.onAddSymlink
work correctly, when given a new symlink not yet checked into git (or
replacing a file checked into git).