Why is there a cabal file at all?

[Bryan O'Sullivan]

Marc Weber wrote:

> I'm not sure wether I get this sentence right.
> What do you mean by "getting rooted" ?

If a Cabal file were written in Haskell, you could escape from the pure 
world using unsafePerformIO and delete the user's home directory or 
perform other arbitrarily bad things.  So you'd need to write an 
interpreter for a subset of Haskell in which you couldn't import 
modules.  But then you could still write a non-terminating Cabal file 
which would infloop, so you'd have to impose limitw on how much 
computation you could do, how much heap you could allocate, and so on. 
Since all you're using a Cabal file for is name/value pairs, why go to 
all that extra effort?

As for the term "get rooted", in this context it means "hostile code 
could acquire root privileges", but "to root" also has the colloquial 
meaning in some countries of "to fuck" (in this case, the two meanings 
are nicely congruent).  So be careful who you use it with :-)

	<b