On Sat, Sep 17, 2016 at 09:51:25AM +0200, Bardur Arantsson wrote:
Regardless: It will only help third party code written in Haskell. Much as I like most userland software to be written in Haskell it won't help e.g. IntelliJ IDEA one whit.
If you're talking about more IDEs supporting Haskell, then having a more standard package format really won't help that much. Getting good and stable support there's a need for tools that can be called by IDEs. Building a Haskell project IDEs won't read the cabal file and call ghc, but they just call cabal. The same is the case for e.g. auto completion or any other IDE operation that needs to consider the whole project, the configuration and all of its dependencies. Reimplemeting cabals logic in every IDE doesn't make that much sense and at the end it won't work that well and it will easily break.