Cabal package description sytax

[Simon Marlow]

On 02 December 2004 05:22, Isaac Jones wrote:

> I'm definitely happy to add more optional fields to the package
> description file.  I knew that the need for such would come up.
> 
> But the interface to cabal is the required description file fields and
> the required Setup arguments.  How do you maintain that interface if
> you're generating the required fields of the description file with the
> Setup program itself? (I'm assuming that you are having Setup
> configure call the ./configure script or something?)
> 
> The idea behind making the cabal description file so easy to parse is
> that other tools can get information like the package name and version
> from the cabal description file, rather than the description file
> sucking it in from someplace else.  I believe this is what the Debian
> package generation tools do, for instance.

It seems that we want a format the for the Setup.description file that
can both

 (a) be parseable without any preprocessing to extract a well-defined
     subset of the full contents (eg. package name, version,
     maintainer, description etc.)

 (b) be combined with information collected by './Setup.lhs configure'
     to form a complete PackageDescription.

could we just make up a syntax for splicing in information from the
configure step into Setup.description?

> A hope with the cabal was to be able to have a Setup.description file
> at the top level of something like a tarball.  Layered tools like
> Hackage know where it is and how to parse it.  If you don't have it in
> the source tarball, but rather generate it during build time, that
> breaks this model.

Don't forget it can be called Foo.hsproj too, for Visual Studio.  This
is working now BTW: we can open up a Cabal package in VS and build it.

Cheers,
	Simon