Multiple .cabal Files

[Frederik Eaton]

On Tue, Jan 09, 2007 at 01:12:56PM +0100, Henning Thielemann wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 8 Jan 2007, Ashley Yakeley wrote:
> 
> > Is there a way to tell cabal to pick a particular .cabal file when there are
> > several in the current directory?
> 
> I had the same question earlier. If multiple .cabal files are supported,
> there must also be multiple .installed-pkg-config and .setup-config files.

I've always seen this as a major issue with the design of Cabal. Why
should there have to be a single file named XXX.cabal when XXX doesn't
actually have a meaning to the Cabal system? If there can only be one
such file, then it should be called Cabalfile or somesuch. On the
other hand, if users are going to be asked to pick a name for their
Cabal file, then multiple files should be allowed.

The answer I've always received is that "someday multiple cabal files
will be allowed". However, if that is the case (and I think it should
be) then I think it would be better to start planning for such use as
early as possible. Otherwise people start depending on things like
.setup-config which may change in new versions of Cabal. And I imagine
there are tools which currently depend on having a single Cabal-file
in a directory, which will have to be changed as well.

Although I don't have time to devote to this problem, anyone who does
will have my special gratitude.

Best wishes,

Frederik

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