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

[Duncan Coutts]

On Mon, 2008-02-25 at 00:52 +0000, Ross Paterson wrote:

> The tags stuff was just a quick hack, but in general my preference is
> to keep the additional data outside of the package, so that what one
> downloads under a particular package-id is always what was uploaded.

I rather like the idea of keeping the .cabal file separate from the
tarball exactly to allow us to fix it without altering the tarball. The
obvious changes being altering the description to add extra links, etc
and to fix lax dependency constraints.

Perhaps this is because I've been working with distros for a while where
we always have a script that allows us to tweak things to make them
work. So it depends on to what extent we want to manage hackage like a
distribution or as a pristine upstream site. I think we want to do both
really, at least for some subset of packages. I don't think we need to
go as far as maintaining patch sets like some distros do. In gentoo, the
most common patch we apply in the ebuild scripts are actually changes to
the .cabal file.

Duncan