[HF-discuss] Do something about Cabal?

[Ignat Insarov]

Thanks Francesco. I have also been using Cabal since a long time ago.
There is no question that some great things get done in Cabal. Mostly,
Cabal does what it says on the box, and this is why I propose to
improve it and not, say, move to Stack. But you may see that many
people prefer the latter — this seems even more weird since, as you
illuminate, Cabal can already interoperate with Stackage, so it is
strictly more featureful. _(As far as I follow, Stack still has poor
support for Backpack and sub-package build targets.)_

However, even in the light of the links you provide, we still cannot
say that Cabal supports Stackage. You say:

> >   There is no reason for two build tools to exist. The killer feature of Stack —
> >   snapshots — should be supported by Cabal.
>
> As far as I know, this is already possible today! [1]
>
> [1] https://github.com/fpco/stackage-server/issues/232
>     see also https://github.com/erikd/jenga/
>              https://hackage.haskell.org/package/stack2cabal

Heading to that link, the closing message says:

> I've added a warning about the lack of support for revisions in cabal.config in f9632d7. Closing.

So, something is not working. Reading in more detail, there is
evidently a disagreement between the core developers of Cabal and
Stack. And as I understand, it has not been addressed ever since! This
is exactly an example of the kind of communication problems that I
alluded to in my first letter. Also, as far as I can see, there has
been zero effort from the Cabal team to integrate these other tools
that you point to.