Why is there a cabal file at all?

[Neil Mitchell]

Hi

> From your argument I conclude that Haskell code unsafe in general, not just
> for package specification.

That is indeed true. Donald has jumped through many hoops to try and
make the code safer for Lambdabot. If you really want truely safe
code, the best thing to do would be to add a patch to Yhc with a
-sandbox flag which would be relatively easy to implement, and could
give solid guarantees about what your code does.

> If I were confident that the problem Cabal address is covered by name/value
> pairs, I might agree that functional programming is overkill.  (Though I'd
> still dislike redundancy among my .cabal files.)  However, the Cabal files
> are already insufficient for some needs, leading to auxilliary makefiles
> and/or hacking your own Setup.lhs.  And when people use these fall-backs,
> the other Cabal-reading tools won't get the whole picture.

True, another reason to make the .cabal file more complete - things
like preprocessors should not be in Setup.hs, for example.

> P.S. Thanks for the language tip.  I had no idea.

Me neither on the second meaning! I just use the term "get rooted" to
mean someone breaks into your computer in malicious ways, since on my
OS of choice there is no root account, only Admin, and most people run
as Admin.

Thanks

Neil