Re: darcs patch: Add liftField and maybeField to ParseUti... (and 1 more)

Isaac Jones wrote:

Duncan Coutts writes:

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- fix the handling of 'x-' fields - with the previous patch cabal would complain about these as unknown in most contexts

Right, it shouldn't ever complain / warn about x-fields, right?

Indeed. I had missed that parseBInfoField handled those.

Cool. I'm OK with it, but worried about Simon's patch that does the same thing. Simon, can you tease out that patch in short order and compare it side-by-side w/ Bertram's? Should we just go ahead and apply Bertram's?

I'm happy either way. It's not an urgent change, it just seemed to be the right thing to do, in order to add new library stanzas.

So this is done w/ a field rather than a flag to configure, but it sounds more like a configure option in most cases, no? Shouldn't this be up to the user more than the package author? It should be a pretty rare package that's meant to be hidden by default.

I wanted this for lambdabot - it's a stand-alone application, but it's plugin-based; one of the plugin's utilities (runplugs) has an auxillary module (ShowQ) that's arguably not useful for general use. To install it properly, a hidden package seemed to be the right thing. And after refactoring the parsing of the package description adding support for that to Distribution.Simple is a very simple change to Cabal.

We could always have both a field and a configure flag.

That makes sense to me, actually. regards, Bertram