Re: Why is there a cabal file at all?

On Wed, 10 Jan 2007, Isaac Jones wrote:

"Conal Elliott" writes:

...

Marc points out that the expressiveness of the Cabal language is insufficient for some packages, and a DSEL would be more expressive. I have the same problem and still have to resort to makefiles to augment my .cabal files.

The original design of Cabal was more like Marc suggests. There was only the Setup file and no .cabal file, and my hope was that we'd build an EDSL for package configurations. Original cabal code would probably look like:

main = defaultMain defaultPackageDescription{ name="foo" , synopsys="bar"}

etc.

Then I was hoping it would evolve to an EDSL.

I also suggested to provide installers in form of Haskell modules. Simon Marlow responded, that this would prohibit manipulation of configuration files (that is, the .cabal files) via GUI.