On 2016-09-16 16:10, Mario Blažević wrote:
After all JSON was born in roughly this spirit, wasn't it?
Yes, and JSON (and JavaScript) would suck for the very same reason. This deficiency of JSON was a major incentive for creating YAML.
I'm mildly in favour of supporting another package format in addition to .cabal, as long as compatibility is kept, and as long as the new format is actually superior. I think any subset of Haskell would be a setback from usability perspective.
This may be somewhat heretical, but I don't actually think we need to have a human-editable format. (Of course it should probably be *reasonably* human-readable/editable just for debugging and such.) Just provide simple commands to view/manipulate whatever package settings there are. Helpfully said commands could also sanity check whatever you're trying to do and perhaps provide better error messages than a tool which only has the "final" package description to work with. For beginners a simple GUI could be provided and IDEs could do their own thing. Problem solves.