On Mon, 2009-11-09 at 03:57 +0000, Neil Mitchell wrote: Hi Neil, You'll be glad to know that we started working on this issue a year and a half ago.
License: GPL-2 Warning: 'license: GPL-2' is not a recognised license.
This is valid syntax so does not break the parser in Cabal as of version 1.4 (but will break it for eg Cabal-1.2 which came with ghc-6.8). We added the syntax before allowing use of the new versioned licenses so that we would not needlessly break old ghc/cabal installations. Now that we've had a full ghc release cycle with a Cabal that has the less fragile parser we're adding versioned GPL licenses as "known" licenses which means you can upload them to hackage.
License: GPL-2+ cabal: hlint.cabal:6: Parse of field 'license' failed.
This is invalid syntax. It's also what you would get with Cabal-1.2 if you used the versioned licenses. So the upshot is that you can now use: * GPL-2 * GPL-3 * LGPL-2.1 * LGPL-3 * MIT I think the hackage upload scripts are compiled against a sufficiently recent version of the Cabal lib for these to be allowed now. It'll tell you that you need to specify at least "cabal-version: >= 1.4". As you saw, it will generate the configure warnings when used with Cabal-1.6 but will still build fine. It will register with ghc-pkg ok but only for ghc-6.10+. The older ghc used the older Cabal which had the horribly fragile license field parser (it used to be Read/Show). I guess it's a bug that we generate package registration info that old ghc will not grok. It's a little late to fix that in the Cabal-1.6 series however. Duncan