Progress: GSoC - Improve the feedback of the cabal-install dependency solver

[Conrad Parker]

On 13 June 2013 23:55, Martin Ruderer <martin.ruderer at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey all,
>
> we are nearing the end of the "Students get to know mentors, read
> documentation, get up to speed to begin working on their
> projects"-Phase and I would like to tell you what I have done so far
> and how you can follow my progress in the future, if you like.
>
> I have forked cabal at https://github.com/mr-/cabal and I have set up
> a little blog at http://cabal-summer.blogspot.de/ .
>
> So far, I have written an IDE to navigate the dependency tree
> interactively. However the output is not very user-friendly yet.
> This I will focus on in the immediate future.
>
> If you have any comments on what you would like to see done, or more
> concretely, have suggestions for useful commands to walk the tree,
> I would be very grateful.

That's a pretty cool UI you've got there. However it's a bit wordy,
perhaps you could draw the tree visually and allow the user to
navigate it that way?

 ------                             -  Package boundary
 |....|      ############           #  Untraversed dependency
 |....|      #          #           .  A cabal file
 |.$..+########         #           $  Some quantity of bugs
 |....|       #      ---+---        +  A version choice
 ------       #      |.....|        |  Package boundary
              #      |.!...|        !  A magic pragma
              #      |.....|
              #      |.. at ..|        @  The user
   ----       #      |.....|
   |..|       #######+..D..|        D  A red dragon book
   |<.+###    #      |.....|        <  Stairs to a higher level dependency
   ----  #    #      |.?...|        ?  A magic script
         ######      -------

Conrad.