required fields in Cabal

[Isaac Jones]

"Simon Marlow" <simonmar at microsoft.com> writes:

> On 22 February 2005 13:17, Krasimir Angelov wrote:
>
>> On Mon, 21 Feb 2005 17:56:08 -0800, Isaac Jones
>> <ijones at syntaxpolice.org> wrote: 
>>> * What any good package should have:
>>>        package (name and version) :: PackageIdentifier,
>>>        license        :: License,
>>> -- OR?
>>>        licenseFile    :: FilePath,
>>>        copyright      :: String,
>>>        maintainer     :: String,
>>>        synopsis       :: String,
>> 
>> The good package should have these fields but they aren't required if
>> you only want to build some code with Cabal. This will be the typical
>> case with VSHaskell. The developer will use Cabal in order to build
>> his/her projects but may never fill these fields. These fields are
>> important when the developer decide to distribute the package. I think
>> that Cabal should check only for "package" field, but Hackage should
>> check for all fields.
>
> Krasimir's right, I'd forgotten about this.  Cabal is going to be used
> not just for distributing libraries & tools, but also just as a simple
> build system for local code (and why not?), and as the main build system
> for Visual Haskell.  

Hmm. I have no problem with this, actually.  I suppose that if Hackage
has to reject a package due to missing fields, someone can just fix
it.  Hackage can document what fields it needs.

> Perhaps if you attempt to do './setup sdist' then it should complain if
> these fields are missing, but otherwise omitting them shouldn't be
> fatal.

I like that idea, but sdist is currently broken, so it doesn't really
make sense.  We can implement that, though, and document it for now.
How 'bout we give warnings during configure for missing fields?

I can do that tonight.  It's easy to change warnings to errors in
PackageDescription if anyone wants to get to it sooner.


peace,

  isaac