[Haskell-cafe] Standard package file format

[Bardur Arantsson]

On 2016-09-16 16:10, Mario Blažević wrote:
>>> After all JSON was born in roughly this spirit, wasn't it?
> 
>     Yes, and JSON (and JavaScript) would suck for the very same reason.
> This deficiency of JSON was a major incentive for creating YAML.
> 
>     I'm mildly in favour of supporting another package format in
> addition to .cabal, as long as compatibility is kept, and as long as the
> new format is actually superior. I think any subset of Haskell would be
> a setback from usability perspective.
> 

This may be somewhat heretical, but I don't actually think we need to
have a human-editable format. (Of course it should probably be
*reasonably* human-readable/editable just for debugging and such.)

Just provide simple commands to view/manipulate whatever package
settings there are. Helpfully said commands could also sanity check
whatever you're trying to do and perhaps provide better error messages
than a tool which only has the "final" package description to work with.

For beginners a simple GUI could be provided and IDEs could do their own
thing.

Problem solves.