brainstorming ways to stabalize Cabal interface?

[Isaac Jones]

Ross Paterson <ross at soi.city.ac.uk> writes:

> On Thu, Jan 19, 2006 at 09:35:32AM +0000, Duncan Coutts wrote:
>> On Wed, 2006-01-18 at 22:57 -0800, Isaac Jones wrote:
>> > I'm keen to try to stabilize more of the Cabal interface,
>> [...]
>> The problem as many people have noted is that Haskell source code in the
>> form of Setup.lhs is quite brittle in the face of changes to the Cabal
>> API and the .cabal file format.
>
> Indeed.  I think the best hope for stability is to make setup scripts
> optional, and to seek to reduce the situations where they're needed.
> The vast majority of scripts are
>
> 	main = defaultMain
> or
> 	main = defaultMainWithHooks defaultUserHooks

Of course, the setup scripts are only a problem in the situations
where they're needed, not in these two situations.

> (Incidentally hackage and packages repository contain very few
> exceptions to this; it seems Gentoo has a much larger collection.)
> If we were to rely on an external tool like Duncan's hs-pkg, we'd need
> a field saying which of these (or future ones) to use.  We'd also need
> version numbers for the file format, which might be expected to change
> less often than Cabal package versions.
>
> Reducing the need for setup scripts involves identifying the missing
> bits people are working around and implementing general facilities.
> Eliminating the boilerplate scripts will help, if only by flagging the
> packages of interest.

The missing bits of cabal?  I disagree.  I don't think we should
eliminate the setup scripts.  There will always be special things that
folks need in their build system, and they will want a general
facility for them, such as the setup script or the multiple scripts
you mentioned.

I don't think that continuing to make cabal more complex is the
answer.  There are definitely some things it should do that it doesn't
do now, but if we abandon the setup scripts, then we will have to
always put everything into cabal itself.

We should instead try to stabalize the cabal interface and put the
complexity into the layered tools.

Stable hooks should solve the problem of the Setup scripts not
compiling, and having a cabal-version field and a more flexible parser
should solve the problem of new or unknown fields.  We've done hardly
any work in these directions.  I think we should at least try these
approaches.


peace,

  isaac