darcs patch: Add liftField and maybeField to ParseUti... (and 1 more)

[Isaac Jones]

Duncan Coutts <duncan.coutts at worc.ox.ac.uk> writes:

> On Fri, 2006-07-28 at 04:56 +0200, Bertram Felgenhauer wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> I've discussed the patch with Duncan Coutts. The result is the attached
>> revised patch. Changes:
>> 
>> - fix the handling of 'x-' fields - with the previous patch cabal would
>>   complain about these as unknown in most contexts

Right, it shouldn't ever complain / warn about x-fields, right?

>> - document liftField and maybeField and make their use for converting
>>   stanzas more obvious in PackageDescription.hs

Sounds good.

> Thanks.
>
> Isaac: I'm happy with both of these patchs if you are.
>
> I've also got a slight improvement on the docs for liftField which I'll
> add if these go in.

Cool.  I'm OK with it, but worried about Simon's patch that does the
same thing.  Simon, can you tease out that patch in short order and
compare it side-by-side w/ Bertram's?  Should we just go ahead and
apply Bertram's?

>> The second patch is unchanged. A note on installing packages hidden:
>> This should be useful for programs that provide their own plugins or
>> other libraries for internal use. It seems to be simple enough for
>> inclusion in Distribution.Simple.
>
> Note that it'd also be useful to be able to Cabalise the GHC API package
> and the old hslibs packages (which makes bundling them with Haskell
> implementations easier as people who care can easily get at them still).

So this is done w/ a field rather than a flag to configure, but it
sounds more like a configure option in most cases, no?  Shouldn't this
be up to the user more than the package author?  It should be a pretty
rare package that's meant to be hidden by default.

We could always have both a field and a configure flag.

peace,

   isaac