Hackage 'changelog' display (was: Fwd: [commit: packages/stm] master: Refactor & update `stm.cabal` to `cabal-version>=1.10` (aa4774b))

[Duncan Coutts]

On Fri, 2013-10-18 at 16:05 +0200, Herbert Valerio Riedel wrote:
> Hello Duncan,
> 
> ...any recommendation on this one? For isntance, how do I best add a link from the
> description-field pointing to the changelog file?

No I think the longer term solution is to treat the changelog properly
in some machine-readable form so that hackage can show the changes in a
reasonable way, e.g. most recent changes, expand to more detail.

I don't think we really want to have the current situation where some
packages have these huge descriptions including long changelogs and
others have nothing. It's all rather inconsistent.

We should probably have hackage show only the first ~20-30 lines of the
description and let the user expand that if they want to see more, and
do a similar thing for the changelog.

Simon makes the point that he likes having the changelog in the .cabal
file rather than a separate file because it's less mental effort to
update, as you can see it at the same time as the version. So perhaps
what we should do is add a changelog field to the .cabal file an allow
that to be inline, or to refer to a file, e.g. "changelog:" or
"changlog-file:". Either way we can then do a bit of simple syntax
checking so we know we can format it ok on hackage and in other tools.

Duncan
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From: Simon Marlow <marlowsd-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org>
Subject: Re: [commit: packages/stm] master: Refactor & update `stm.cabal` to `cabal-version>=1.10` (aa4774b)
Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2013 13:06:13 +0200
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