Cabal File Pretty Printer

[Herbert Valerio Riedel]

On 2014-02-27 at 20:23:59 +0100, Erik Hesselink wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 26, 2014 at 4:01 PM, Johan Tibell <johan.tibell at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Wed, Feb 26, 2014 at 3:51 PM, Tillmann Rendel
>> <rendel at informatik.uni-marburg.de> wrote:
>>>
>>>  1. change `cabal init` to use the pretty printer.
>>>  2. expose the pretty printer at the command line.
>>
>> Agreed on both points. We should add (2) as `cabal format` (similar to
>> go-fmt) or something like that.
>
> I would love to have this, it would make editing cabal files with
> tools much more appealing. 
> [...]

...not only that, it might help for extracting information from .cabal
files via shell script commands (like .e.g. package name, package
version so on), if they can be normalized to a simpler to parse
canonically indented format (without having to write a tool in Haskell
using the Cabal parser directly...)