Re: Advance notice that I'd like to make Cabal depend on parsec

On Fri, 2013-03-15 at 12:37 +0800, Conrad Parker wrote:

On 14 March 2013 22:53, Duncan Coutts wrote:

...

I've been doing regression testing against hackage and I'm satisfied that the new parser matches close enough. I've uncovered all kinds of horrors with .cabal files in the wild relying on quirks of the old parser. I've made adjustments for most of them but I will be breaking a half dozen old packages

When you say you've "made adjustments for" dodgy .cabal files in the wild, do you mean that you'll send those maintainers patches that make their cabal files less dodgy, or do you mean you've added hacks to your parser to reproduce the quirky behaviour?

The latter, but the egregiousness of the hacks is actually not too bad in the end. I don't find it revolting. For the worst examples I didn't make adjustments and those ones will break. I think I've made a reasonable judgement about the where to draw the line between the two. I can look into generating warnings in those cases (which is probably better than me emailing them). Duncan