[Haskell-cafe] [HF-discuss] Do something about Cabal?

[Bardur Arantsson]

On 11/12/2020 10.56, Oliver Charles wrote:
> On Fri, 11 Dec 2020, at 9:50 AM, Bardur Arantsson wrote:
>> (Dhall could work here since you can at least do inclusions and reuse in
>> a generic way. Plus it has fully defined semantics plus implementations
>> in at least a couple of langauges, Haskell and Scala.)
> 
> Psst https://hackage.haskell.org/package/dhall-to-cabal
> <https://hackage.haskell.org/package/dhall-to-cabal> :)
> 

Yes, thank for pointing that out :). I think I actually tried it at one
point, but it was way to immature at the time... must have slipped my
mind since then.

IIRC my major problem at the time I tried it, it was also *really* slow.
I mean "minutes" rather than "seconds" slow.

I think that may have been due to performance problems in the Haskell
implementation of Dhall, so hopefully it's not an issue these days.

(It might also have been PEBKAC on my part, it's all a bit fuzzy...)

> I think the missing piece here is making a frontend that transparently
> turns Dhall to Cabal syntax and runs cabal-install, so you don't ha ve
> to keep regenerating files.
> 

That would be nice, but for large-scale adoption I think it probably
needs to actually be an *official* format and perhaps even be upstreamed
so that it gets maintained along with the Cabal format. (To account for
things that change semi-often like extension names, new cabal settings,
and whatnot.) Plus to know that it will be maintained well into the future.

Thanks for working on it, btw. Might give it a shop when I get tired of
hpack/YAML :).

Regards,