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

[Duncan Coutts]

On Tue, 2006-08-01 at 11:26 -0700, Isaac Jones wrote:
> Duncan Coutts <duncan.coutts at worc.ox.ac.uk> writes:

> >> - 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?

Right.

> > 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?

I'm happy to wait and apply after Simon.

> > 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?

I don't think so. It is actually the package author who knows if it
*must* be installed hidden, eg if it severely pollutes the module
namespace like hslibs.

It's true that the user might want to make it hidden even if the package
author didn't, though at the moment we don't provide the user with the
option and no one complains. They can change it using ghc-pkg anyway.

> It should be a pretty rare package that's meant to be hidden by default.

That's true, though there are hslibs, the GHC api and lambdabot/Yi/hIDE
style plug-in packages.

Duncan