[Haskell-cafe] Shake, Shelly, & FilePath

[Eli Frey]

I began converting an unwieldy Makefile into a Haskell program via Shake,
hoping that I could increase both its readability and modularity.  The
modularity has increased greatly, and I have found it exhilarating how much
more I can express about my dependencies.  However, readability has
suffered.

I quickly found that heavy shell interaction became unwieldy and I came out
with code that was much more difficult to scan with my eyes then what I had
in my Makefile.

I attempted to fix this by using the Shelly library for my shell
interactions, and was well pleased until I attempted to compile and
discovered Shelly.FilePath is NOT Prelude.FilePath.  Now I am left
sprinkling coercions all over the place and am again shaking my head at how
difficult to scan my code has become.

I have been considering writing a shim over Shelly, but the prospect makes
me uneasy.

Has anyone else walked down this path before, and if so what did you bring
away from the experience?  I find this situation such a shame, as all my
other experiences with both libraries have been quite wonderful.

- Eli
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