Why is there a cabal file at all?

[Conal Elliott]

Marc points out that the expressiveness of the Cabal language is
insufficient for some packages, and a DSEL would be more expressive.  I have
the same problem and still have to resort to makefiles to augment my .cabal
files.

DSELs also provide sharing/reuse.  I know my Cabal specs are similar, and
yet I cannot capture that commonality.

Using a DSEL does not imply that it route through IO, though from Marc's
examples I'm guessing he has IO in mind.  Avoiding IO would address your
points about day of week and random strings.

So I hope Marc's suggestion gets some consideration.

 - Conal

On 1/9/07, Neil Mitchell <ndmitchell at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Marc,
>
> [Snip]
>
> > Any ideas, comments?
> >
> > Anyone out there who wants to join and help implementing this idea?
>
> I'd ask why there is a Setup.hs file at all, a nice textual
> declarative form seems much more sensible. You can encode everything
> in Haskell, but you probably shouldn't...
>
> First off, its harder to read, harder to parse (unless you happen to
> be a Haskell compiler) and just not as straight forward. Should you be
> able to pick which library version you want based on the day of the
> week? Should your package name be allowed to be a random string which
> changes each time?
>
> It is a cute idea (less different forms), but I don't think it fits
> the problem in this case.
>
> Thanks
>
> Neil
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