build-depends in old-style package descriptions

Thomas Schilling nominolo at googlemail.com
Sun Sep 9 11:37:32 EDT 2007


On Sun, 2007-09-09 at 14:42 +0100, Ross Paterson wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 09, 2007 at 03:18:43PM +0200, Thomas Schilling wrote:
> > (1) was easier at the time.  (2) should be relatively easy to implement
> > now, but since the current implementation works, I didn't bother so far.
> > I know that (1) is a rather hackish solution, but why is it "just
> > wrong"?  (After all, it works.)
> 
> It makes a package that doesn't contain a library look like it does
> have one (though unbuildable).  I think there's an important difference
> between the two cases; it certainly matters to clients.

Note that it does not rewrite the _external_ package description.  Cabal
now internally uses the section-based syntax, so we have to rewrite old
flat package descriptions to the section-based format _internally_.
I.e., the actual text-file is never overridden, so no end-user will ever
see this.



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