be friendlier to user (was Re: What's next?)

[Sergei Trofimovich]

On Wed, 4 Sep 2013 21:14:03 -0700
Johan Tibell <johan.tibell at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> With 1.18 out the door it's time to look towards the future. Here are
> the major themes I'd like to see us work on next:

While those are grand and nice goals I'd like to see some progress
in tiny bits - just verifying some basic deficiencies in packages uploaded
on hackage.

1. Would be nice of 'cabal check' (and cabal upload) would warn user
   about using outdated packages in constraints.

   Typically users don't even know they use old vulnerable versions
   of cryptopackages or broken testsuite packages. Which does not
   make packaging (and using) such stuff simpler.

2. Would be nice for cabal build somehow check that 'ghc --make'
    can't access files not present in .cabal file.

    That way amount of packages with missing uploaded tests
    could be shunken down.

    Otherwise we have fun situation. github repos have CI hooks,
    but 'cabal sdist' result is unusable.

    I guess the simplest would be to copy/symlink part of sorce tree
    into temp dir and run 'ghc --make' there.

3. Warn about "silly" depend, like:
    - base > 4 (instead of base >= 4)
    - base <= 5 (instead of base < 5)
    - protocol-buffers == 2.0.14 (instead of trying to follow PVP with protocol-buffers == 2.0.*)

Thanks!

-- 

  Sergei
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