Why is there a cabal file at all?

[Henning Thielemann]

On Wed, 10 Jan 2007, Isaac Jones wrote:

> "Conal Elliott" <conal at conal.net> writes:
> 
> > 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.
> 
> The original design of Cabal was more like Marc suggests.  There was
> only the Setup file and no .cabal file, and my hope was that we'd
> build an EDSL for package configurations.  Original cabal code would
> probably look like:
> 
> main = defaultMain defaultPackageDescription{ name="foo"
>                                             , synopsys="bar"}
> 
> etc.
> 
> Then I was hoping it would evolve to an EDSL.

I also suggested to provide installers in form of Haskell modules. Simon
Marlow responded, that this would prohibit manipulation of configuration
files (that is, the .cabal files) via GUI.