ANN: Cabal 0.5 (GHC 6.4 release candidate)

[Isaac Jones]

This is a release-candidate for 0.6, which will be in GHC 6.4.

http://www.haskell.org/cabal/download.html


                      The Haskell Cabal
The Common Architecture for Building Applications and Libraries.
http://www.haskell.org/cabal

IMPORTANT INFORMATION:

See both the README file and the changelog for important interface
changes.

DOWNLOAD:

The Haskell Cabal has reached pre-release stage.  The community should
use this release to evaluate the interfaces and explore the concepts
of these tools.

Download the Cabal here (source and debian versions available):
http://www.haskell.org/cabal/download.html

BUGS:

Please report bugs and wish-list items to libraries at haskell.org and
Isaac Jones: ijones at syntaxpolice.org.


ABOUT:

The Haskell Cabal is meant to be a part of a larger infrastructure for
distributing, organizing, and cataloging Haskell Libraries and
Tools. It is an effort to provide a framework for developers to more
effectively contribute their software to the Haskell community.

Specifically, the Cabal describes what a Haskell package is, how these
packages interact with the language, and what Haskell implementations
must to do to support packages. The Cabal also specifies some
infrastructure (code) that makes it easy for tool authors to build and
distribute conforming packages.

The Cabal is only one contribution to the larger goal. In particular,
the Cabal says nothing about more global issues such as how authors
decide where in the module name space their library should live; how
users can find a package they want; how orphan packages find new
owners; and so on.

NOTES:

You cannot currently execute the setup scripts with "./Setup.lhs"
since Cabal Hugs support isn't ready-for-prime-time.  You can compile
it with ghc thusly: "ghc -package Cabal Setup.lhs -o setup" and then
use the "setup" executable after that.

This release is meant to provide the community with concrete
information about how the interfaces are shaping up.  This release
does NOT fix the interfaces, we can't promise not to break anything
that relies on these interfaces.  We hope that Haskell authors will
try to package their software using these tools, and let us know where
they fall short.

MORE INFORMATION:

Please see the web site for the source code, interfaces, and
especially the proposal, which will serve as documentation for this
release:

http://www.haskell.org/cabal/