Hi Sven,
I'm having problems understanding the Cabal package description syntax (I can't find a formal spec),
There won't be a formal spec until we're closer to freezing it.
especially the use of quotes. Some field values can be quoted, others can't, but I can't see any general principle here.
The principal is that if there are fields that contain multiple values and unpredictable syntax, then you can use quotes. Maybe the only place that this is true is for file paths. You may note that the example in the proposal has a comma.
My problem in particular is that I want to use the values from autoconf's AC_INIT (PACKAGE_NAME, PACKAGE_VERSION, PACKAGE_BUGREPORT) for some package fields (name, version, maintainer), but the former have double quotes around them, while ghc-pkg either doesn't allow them (name, version) or includes the quotes into the value (maintainer).
I'm a little unclear about what you're looking for wrt the interaction between autoconf, cabal, and ghc-pkg.
IMHO this should be more consistent and unified, and a possible solution would be that quotes are handled like they are in shells, so "blah" and blah are the same.
I think I like this idea for the cabal package description, and it would definitely be good to have consistency between the public parts of HC-pkg and cabal's package description. Unless anyone has objections to allowing quotes in all the fields, you should feel free to alter cabal's parser and send me a patch (it'll probably be a few days before I can do any serious cabal hacking). Since it's necessary for some fields, it'll probably simplify it if quotes are allowed everywhere. Opinions anyone? I'm not sure what this'll do when it dumps out a ghc-pkg description file, though, so some care should be taken (maybe that's what you're getting at above). peace, isaac