Opening up Cabal development

[Paolo G. Giarrusso]

Edward Z. Yang <ezyang <at> mit.edu> writes:

> Excerpts from Herbert Valerio Riedel's message of 2016-07-13 23:40:06 -0700:
> > I.e. write up a specification/proposal outlining motivation (i.e. what
> > problem does this solve), specify what the changes are exactly (syntax &
> > semantics), what the consequences are, and so on.
> > 
> > Then we inevitably need some criteria to decide whether a proposal is
> > accepted and approved for implementation. This could be formally in the
> > hands of the core library committee together with the Hackage trustees
> > (since we do have quite some experience with .cabal files and care a lot
> > about the Hackage ecosystem).
> 
> Why can't we release experimental changes to the Cabal specification?
> Neither setup-depends nor convenience libraries went through any formal
> proposal mechanism.  If a feature is good people will start using it
> and we will have to continue supporting it.  If a feature is bad/not
> useful we can yank it from the next release; anyone using an
> experimental feature like this isn't trying to maximize their
> Cabal compatibility anyway.

Important nitpick: to do that, experimental features should be
marked as experimental and this policy should be made explicit.
That'd be kinder to the one user who starts using it without
realizing.

I guess that goes without saying (probably in ways I don't
realize), but hey :-D