Re: Cabal File Pretty Printer

On 2014-02-27 at 20:23:59 +0100, Erik Hesselink wrote:

On Wed, Feb 26, 2014 at 4:01 PM, Johan Tibell wrote:

...

On Wed, Feb 26, 2014 at 3:51 PM, Tillmann Rendel wrote:

...

1. change `cabal init` to use the pretty printer. 2. expose the pretty printer at the command line.

Agreed on both points. We should add (2) as `cabal format` (similar to go-fmt) or something like that.

I would love to have this, it would make editing cabal files with tools much more appealing. [...]

...not only that, it might help for extracting information from .cabal files via shell script commands (like .e.g. package name, package version so on), if they can be normalized to a simpler to parse canonically indented format (without having to write a tool in Haskell using the Cabal parser directly...)