Automagic cabalising of projects?

[Donald Bruce Stewart]

So, on the joy of functional infrastructure. As previously discussed at the
cafe, there's a bit of a plan to make a cabalising wizard.

Yesterday I hacked up a quick tool[1] to do 2 things:

[1] http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/code/mkcabal/ 
    
1) create a stub cabal file:

    $ runhaskell ../mkcabal.hs
    Project name: haq
    What license ["GPL","LGPL","BSD3","BSD4","PublicDomain","AllRightsReserved"] [BSD3]: BSD3
    Created Setup.lhs and haq.cabal

    $ ls
    Setup.lhs haq.cabal

    $ cat haq.cabal 
    Name:                haq
    Version:             0.0
    Description:         Project description
    License:             BSD3
    License-file:        LICENSE
    Author:              Author Name
    Maintainer:          user at email.address
    Build-Depends:       base
     
    Executable:          haq
    Main-is:             Haq.hs

    $ cat Setup.lhs 
    #!/usr/bin/env runhaskell
    > import Distribution.Simple
    > main = defaultMain

2) create a stub project repo, including cabal files and readmes

    $ runhaskell ../mkcabal.hs --init-project
    Project name: haq
    What license ["GPL","LGPL","BSD3","BSD4","PublicDomain","AllRightsReserved"] [BSD3]: 
    Created new project directory: haq

    $ ls
    haq

    $ cd haq

    $ ls
    Haq.hs    LICENSE   README    Setup.lhs haq.cabal

Neil et al have suggested that the core should be abstracted out as a library,
in order to write clients. This is a good idea.

I'm interested, oh Ancient and Justified Developers of the Cabal, about where
this should go. Should the tool try to fill in more details? If so it should
probably be part of the cabal distro and use the existing cabal library.

Should it stay lightweight? Should it try to discover the project src tree?
Should it suggest hierarchical names to use?

How can we make this most useful? Do people know of package wizards for other
infrastructure that works well?

What plans for automagic cabalisation have people been thinking about.

Cheers,
  Don