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

[Duncan Coutts]

On Mon, 2008-02-25 at 23:04 +0000, Ian Lynagh wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 09:11:50PM +0000, Duncan Coutts wrote:
> > 
> > On Mon, 2008-02-25 at 11:41 +0000, Ross Paterson wrote:
> > 
> > > 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.
> > 
> > True, however when planning what to install, cabal-install at least will
> > use the .cabal file from the index, so any fixes to deps etc will be
> > taken into account. We would also encourage people writing tools to
> > convert cabal packages to distro packages to use the .cabal file from
> > the index.
> 
> For what it's worth, I agree with Ross (if I understand his position
> correctly, at any rate): I don't think we should be changing the
> external cabal file, nor expecting distributions to use any external
> changes. If changes are needed then someone should do a new upload, with
> a different version number.

Though you'd have to admit that distros will fix dependencies to be more
accurate without waiting for any upstream release. Finding accurate deps
is often something one only finds after having released and got other
people to test on a range of platforms.

Duncan