Marc Weber
Isaac: I'm new to this project cabal/ hackage. So I need to know wether this is still the right place to discuss this (because this descission has been made some time ago and Cabal seems to move in a direction I don't like (using text/ cabal file like configurations)
Or is the right thing to do fork and create another mailinglist if anyone is interested, too?
I certainly wouldn't encourage you to fork. I think that the design of cabal is quite good, and the closest to what users actually want. I think that at this point, it's a bikeshed (and one that's already been built (and painted)): http://www.unixguide.net/freebsd/faq/16.19.shtml There are more exciting and interesting things to work on now. The action is in cabal-install and hackage; building layered tools to get Haskell programs into the hands of end-users. But if you are seriously interested in the area of a domain specific language for packages, I'd encourage you to make it something that would work within the context of the hooks, so that people can write nicer Setup scripts, and it should be pretty neutral to whether or not there's a package description file. Writing setup scripts isn't too easy these days, and if you can come up with something to make it better, that would be great. Remember: Cabal isn't only the build infrastructure, it's also the metadata format that tools like Hackage use. If you decide to combine data and code, you will no longer be able to manipulate the data with another tool.
Anyway it would be cool to put these kinds of "descission" having been made long time ago somewhere on the cabal page for information why Cabal is the way it is.
Feel free to do so on the wiki if you dig stuff up.
When I come up with something useful I'll post here again.
Feel free! peace, isaac