I am starting a new thread for the package file format related discussion.
From a developer's perspective, the major benefit of a standard and widely adopted format and is that people can utilize their knowledge acquired from elsewhere, they do not have to go through and learn differently looking and incomplete documentation of different tools. The benefit of a common config specification is that developers can choose tools freely without worrying about learning the same concepts presented in different ways.
Multiple formats flying around also create a psychological impression of complexity in the ecosystem for newcomers. If we have consistency there are better chances of attracting more people to the language ecosystem. I gather the following from the discussion till now: * We have cabal, YAML and TOML as potential candidates for a common package format which can additionally incorporate the concept of snapshots/package collections and potentially more extensions useful across build tools. * cabal has the benefit of incumbency and backward compatibility, it has shortcomings which are being addressed but it is still a format which is very specific to Haskell ecosystem. It is not a standard and not going to become one. We have to always deal with it ourselves and everyone coming to Haskell will have to learn it. * YAML (http://yaml.org/spec/1.2/spec.html) is standard and popular. A significant chunk of developer community is already familiar with it. It is being used by stack and by hpack as an alternative to cabal format. The complaint against it is that the specification/implementation is overly complex. * TOML (https://github.com/toml-lang/toml) is promising, simpler than YAML and is being used by a few important projects but is still evolving and is not completely stable. On a first glance it looks pretty simple and a lot of other tools use a similar config format. It is aiming to become a standard and aiming for a wider adoption. As a next step we can perhaps do an hpack like experiment using the TOML format. That way we will have some experience with that as well and get to know if there are any potential problems expressing the existing cabal files. More thoughts, opinions on the topic will help create a better understanding about it. -harendra