My point was to make it easier for any new tool writers to choose the same format over something entirely new, there are some examples in the notes. I have not investigated it in detail but there must be some reason why the cabal format is not being adopted or is not likely to be adopted by new tools describing package metadata; I was thinking the format being seen as tightly attached to cabal and not usable in general might be one reason. Is it likely to be seen as an independent format if it has a spec describing it and an independent parsing library? Or is it some entirely different reason altogether? Or maybe its not worth caring about whether all tools use the same language for metadata, I might be the only one?