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

[Don Stewart]

johan.tibell:
> On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 12:09 AM, Don Stewart <dons at galois.com> wrote:
> > igloo:
> >
> > > On Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 01:26:52PM -0800, Donald Bruce Stewart wrote:
> >  > > duncan.coutts:
> >  > > >
> >  > > > It's no use pretending that readFile returns Unicode, it just doesn't
> >  > > > (except on Hugs which does it properly). GHC is not going to catch up on
> >  > > > this any time soon.
> >  > >
> >  > > Why don't we use the existing, portable UTF8 IO package?
> >  >
> >  > I'd much rather we fix the IO library that's already in the corelibs
> >  > than add a second one to work around it.
> >  >
> >  > I wonder if that's suitable for a SoC project?
> >
> >  Add System.IO.UTF8.{readFile,writeFile} to the base library?
> 
> I'd rather see that we add a more general solution for reading and
> writing Unicode than add two functions specialized for UTF-8 that we
> can't remove later when we do have a less ad-hoc solution.

Whatever we decide on, I'd like to see it as a standalone library first,
so we can at least get some experience with it. I'm really more
suggesting utf8-string as a model -- we don't need to rip apart base to
get this done.

-- Don