Few questions

[Esa Ilari Vuokko]

On 8/12/07, Duncan Coutts <duncan.coutts at worc.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
> On Sat, 2007-08-11 at 16:05 +0300, Esa Ilari Vuokko wrote:
> > * Are extended fields going to be part of public interface (HEAD
> >   Cabal doesn't warn for fields starting "x-")?
>
> They probably should be, just as a [(Name, Value)] style format.

Cool.

> > * Could we document what's allowed format/character set for file
> >   specified by license-file?  (cabal2wix needs to make rtf from the
> >   text to show it during install - I'd like to know if that's going
> >   to be sensibly possible.)
>
> We should say that .cabal files and the license file are UTF8. But then
> we need to make that true too ;-)

Hehe.  Maybe I'll go utf-8 and fallback on wierd stuff to...Windows stuff.

> > * Is ghc-pkg supposed to handle license-file field?  GHC documents it,
> >   referring to Cabal docs, but Cabal doesn't generate it for
> >   installed-pkg-config.  (Maybe because license file is not
> >   installed?)
>
> No idea. It looks like it does not contain the license file in the
> InstalledPackageInfo which is the structure ghc-pkg uses.
>
> Do you think we really need that? We can install the license file even
> without ghc-pkg knowing about it.

In theory, I'd love to have it - it would make it easy to make installers for
programs, and add all licenses into the installer.  Might be great quick start
for open source programs, at least.  But it's certainly not a big deal.

> > * Are defaultMain-helpers supposed to turn relative paths from
> >   commandline into absolute ones?  (I ran into this problem with Alex'
> >   Setup.lhs, which changes working directory for copying files.)
>
> No idea. Can you be more specific?

Running following in alex source directory

setup copy --destdir=dist\cabal2wix

causes alex's setup hooks copy files in template\ directory to
template\dist\cabal2wix\$datadir, because dist\cabal2wix is assumed
to be absolute, and hook changes the working directory into template\.

Thanks,
Esa