patch applied (cabal): First pass at parsing .cabal files as UTF8

[Duncan Coutts]

On Sun, 2008-02-24 at 18:28 +0000, Ross Paterson wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 24, 2008 at 05:46:35PM +0000, Duncan Coutts wrote:
> > So what about hackage? It now has to assume the Strings in the package
> > description etc are proper Haskell Unicode Strings and convert to UFT8
> > output. Distribution.Simple.Utils exports toUTF8 for this purpose.
> 
> XHTML output should be OK: it assumes a charset of iso8859-1 and turns
> higher chars into HTML entities.

Right, ok.

> text/plain output (used by cabal upload) will need some work, though.
> I'm not sure what the deal is with charset negotiation.

Yeah, me neither. I know it's possible in principle but no idea how to
do it. It may not be possible through the CGI interface.

BTW, I notice the new tags stuff on hackage. I was originally thinking
we would use "x-" extra fields in the .cabal file for that kind of
thing. They're now parsed an exposed as [(name,value)] in the
PackageDescription. The main thing preventing that at the moment is we
don't have a pretty printer for package descriptions, at least not one
that works.

Otherwise, all the stuff about wanting to edit package descriptions
after upload, eg to edit the description, add extra links etc could be
done that way (with suitable authentication). And the extra tags we'll
want like:

HAppS/0.8.4/HAppS.cabal:

x-hackage-superceded-by: HAppS-Server

Duncan