[Haskell-cafe] Standard package file format

[Sven Panne]

2016-09-16 19:14 GMT+02:00 Bardur Arantsson <spam at scientician.net>:

> This may be somewhat heretical, but I don't actually think we need to
> have a human-editable format. [...]


Coming back to the central question (see Chris' mail): What problem do we
solve by doing that? Replacing a relatively easy to read format by
something unreadable by humans? That's probably the opposite of what we
want...


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

If somebody thinks a GUI is a good idea, we don't need to change something
at all: Just write a GUI for reading/editing .cabal files.


> Problem solves.
>

Which problem? :-) Unless we really define what we want to improve and why,
the whole discussion is pointless. Is it readability by humans? Being
"standard" (whatever that means)? Being easily parsable, probably by a
separate library? Being more flexible by what one can express? Having more
abstraction facilities in the description? I have the impression that
different people in this discussion try to solve different problems.

Cheers,
    S.
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