[Haskell-cafe] Re: cabal: other-modules

[Dougal Stanton]

On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 1:49 PM, Ivan Lazar Miljenovic
<ivan.miljenovic at gmail.com> wrote:
> Johannes Waldmann <waldmann at imn.htwk-leipzig.de> writes:
>> What happened was this:
>> I still don't see why this "other-modules" is needed.
>> Ok, I understand the technical reason that cabal
>> does not do dependency analysis but morally, it should?
>
> Why are people suddenly using the term "morally" when they mean "why
> doesn't this do what I think it should"?  None of its definitions seem
> to match what you mean:
> http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=moral

The proper use of words isn't dictated by what is found in small
dictionaries but by the speakers of the language. Also I would caution
against the judgement 'sudden' if you haven't done a corpus check: the
recency illusion can be a real pain.

'Morally' seems just the perfect word for this occasion --- concerned
with right or proper conduct. In this case, potential discrepancies
between the files that cabal 'knows' about when issuing different
commands; or the sense of deceit when it 'appears' to work only for
faults to appear further down the line.

I would guess this is just something we have to live with if cabal
can't be expected to include its own parser & dependency chaser.

Documentation is always a good first step though :-)

Cheers,

D