[Haskell-cafe] Re: a cabal/database lib experience

[Donald Bruce Stewart]

simonmarhaskell:
> Claus Reinke wrote:
> 
> >cabal:
> >   - the separation into interpreter/compiler and resource as Setup
> >       does not set up the right mindset in users. for instance, you can
> >       "runhaskell Setup.hs --help" as for most unixy tools, but who'd
> >       think of that in this situation, and how much does it help?
> >
> >   + add a dedicated command "cabal", which does nothing more
> >       than "runhaskell Setup", but is more memorable and suggestive
> 
> cabal-setup does this, but wasn't included with the latest release of 
> Cabal.  It should be in the next one, I hope.  The plan is to deprecate 
> 'runhaskell Setup.lhs' in favour of 'cabal-setup'.   Feel free to suggest 
> changing the name to 'cabal', although some might argue that 'cabal-get' is 
> the high-level tool and should therefore get the name 'cabal' instead.
> 
> >   - cabal/darcs/haddock are no replacement for minimal help texts:
> >       cabal should require the existence of a README
> 
> absolutely, this has occurred to me too.  There should be a stanard Cabal 
> README file, and Don's mkcabal tool could drop it in the tree.

This occurred to me too. My current plan for mkcabal is that it creates:

    foo.cabal
    Setup.lhs
    README
    LICENSE

based on a series of interactive questions, or command line args.

-- Don