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

[Ross Paterson]

On Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 09:35:58AM +0000, Duncan Coutts wrote:
> 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.

I don't follow you there.  There's a copy of the .cabal file inside the
tarball, which you say you're not changing, but it is the tarball that
people will download and build.

Should the pristine used by secondary distributions include the modified
cabal file, and if so should they include a timestamp in the version
number?