Cabal package descriptions

[Simon Marlow]

On 10 February 2005 18:39, Isaac Jones wrote:

> I'm still a bit worried; I suspect the Distribution.Make stuff is out
> of date, and if we're under a freeze already then that should probably
> go away.  setup sdist has bitrotted too, and I don't have a hugs test
> suite yet.
> 
> The change I made to add preprocessors to UserHooks is pretty
> important, IMO.
> 
> I can definitely release cabal separately; I have maintained an
> independent tree, as you know, but there are obviously problems with
> this.  Are we under a code freeze right now?  Can we get another
> weekend to hack on it?

The GHC 6.4 release is way overdue.  We originally planned to push it
out in Aug last year, and it's now been over a year since the last major
release of GHC!  I suppose given that, another couple of weeks won't
hurt :-)

What is important, as I see it, is that the version of Cabal we ship
with GHC 

  - can support building & registering 3rd party packages for 
    some time to come

  - will be compatible with future enhancements to Cabal.
    That is, packages which work with this version of Cabal will
    also work with future versions (maybe until the next
    *major* release of Cabal, at least).

So the second point means that the syntax we use for .cabal files, and
the Distribution.* API, have to be supported for some time to come.  We
should be clear about which parts of the Distribution.* API are actually
supposed to be stable, BTW.

Cheers,
	Simon