[Haskell-cafe] Package metadata format - notes from discussion

[Patrick Pelletier]

One impression I've gotten (although I have not looked into this 
closely) is that the API for cabal-the-library does not seem to be very 
stable.  From looking at the version history of the standalone-haddock 
tool, it appears that it has to change frequently for new versions of 
cabal, and only supports one version of cabal at a time.  (And it 
currently isn't up-to-date with the latest cabal.) This makes it 
difficult to use, because my cabal is probably too old or too new.

--Patrick

On 11/2/16 10:05 AM, Harendra Kumar wrote:
> Peter,
>
> My point was to make it easier for any new tool writers to choose the 
> same format over something entirely new, there are some examples in 
> the notes. I have not investigated it in detail but there must be some 
> reason why the cabal format is not being adopted or is not likely to 
> be adopted by new tools describing package metadata; I was thinking 
> the format being seen as tightly attached to cabal and not usable in 
> general might be one reason. Is it likely to be seen as an independent 
> format if it has a spec describing it and an independent parsing 
> library? Or is it some entirely different reason altogether? Or maybe 
> its not worth caring about whether all tools use the same language for 
> metadata, I might be the only one?
>
> -harendra
>
> On 2 November 2016 at 21:46, Peter Simons <simons at nospf.cryp.to 
> <mailto:simons at nospf.cryp.to>> wrote:
>
>     Hi Harendra,
>
>      > It might help if the [Cabal] parser is modularized and detached
>     from
>      > the cabal tool itself so that it can be used independently by any
>      > other tools wishing to do so.
>
>     I'm not quite sure how to interpret that statement. The parser for the
>     Cabal format is quite modular and re-usable already and has been
>     available
>     in the Cabal library for years:
>
>     http://hackage.haskell.org/package/Cabal-1.24.0.0/docs/Distribution-PackageDescription-Parse.html
>     <http://hackage.haskell.org/package/Cabal-1.24.0.0/docs/Distribution-PackageDescription-Parse.html>
>
>     Am I missing something?
>
>     Best regards,
>     Peter
>
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