cabal design wiki pages

[Frederik Eaton]

Hi all,

I've put up some pages on the wiki to provide a forum for discussion
about the design of Cabal, as Isaac has asked me to do.

http://haskell.org/hawiki/Cabal/Design

Things still need to be done. The TODO list, which I just copied from
the Cabal distribution, probably needs to be edited (maybe it should
only contain current items?). This is partly an experiment to see what
can be accomplished with the wiki model. I was kind of depending on
email change notification being available (I was told that it was) to
make things quicker, but it hasn't been enabled on this installation.
Shae Erisson is apparently working on it.

There are some things that I want to point people to, however. The
first is a discussion about how to add proper virtualization to Cabal:

http://haskell.org/hawiki/Cabal/VirtualizationRequirements

There are some proposals.

The second is a set of questions that have been raised by myself and
others about the GHC packaging system in the process:

http://haskell.org/hawiki/GHCPackageDesignFAQ

It would be nice if someone could add answers to the second document,
to compliment my questions.

I don't know how much time I'll have to spend on Cabal after this,
since I'll be in school. I've pointed out what I think are some
serious design flaws in the way both Cabal and GHC think about
packages, which will become more apparent and more serious if these
tools get wider adoption, and I hope that my comments have been
valued.

Frederik

-- 
http://ofb.net/~frederik/