On 16 September 2016 at 16:51, Paolo Giarrusso <p.giarrusso@gmail.com> wrote:

I agree "full-fledged build system" is not a possible immediate goal.
But an EDSL for expressing cabal projects (as they are today) would
still be in scope of your proposal—and I thought you liked the idea
(see quote below). Using the earlier options: option 3 is not in scope
of this thread, but option 2 is, with the only danger that the design
space is so big to present a challenge.

Yeah I like the idea of using Haskell for configs but perhaps in a different problem space e.g. in a build spec. See the quote from my earlier quote below, sorry for the confusion :-) Yes, maybe option 2 might work for package specifications but sounds pretty hairy to explore for this use case alone, unless we have other motivations.

Quoting from Harendra Kumar's earlier mail:

If we have to express not just a package specification but a sophisticated build configuration, we need a real language. Expressing conditionals, reuse etc becomes a compromise in a purely declarative language.

-harendra