In message <20080418153703.GN8763@darcs.net> haskell-cafe@haskell.org, darcs-devel@darcs.net writes:
One goal of franchise is to not require developers to provide redundant information. For instance, you've already listed all the modules you use, and ghc already knows which modules are present in which packages, so there's in general no need for you to list the packages that you require, much less their versions.
Yeah, this is an important point. Part of the original idea of Cabal was to help distribution by properly tracking dependencies. It's not too bad for that use case but it's really a pain in comparison to ghc --make or hmake which just do the right thing given the environment. Part of our plan for Cabal 2.x is to do proper module dependency chasing so that it will work without a .cabal file in simple cases and be usable for the ghc --make or hmake use cases (but with support for preprocessors and parallel build). It should be possible to just start hacking and derive a skeleton .cabal file afterwards if you decide you want to distribute a package. Duncan