ANN: Cabal 0.4

The Haskell Cabal The Common Architecture for Building Applications and Libraries. http://www.haskell.org/cabal IMPORTANT INFORMATION: See both the README file and the changelog for important interface changes. DOWNLOAD: The Haskell Cabal has reached pre-release stage, with a 0.4 version The community should use this release to evaluate the interfaces and explore the concepts of these tools. Download the Cabal here (source and debian versions available): http://www.haskell.org/cabal/download.html BUGS: Please report bugs and wish-list items to libraries@haskell.org and Isaac Jones: ijones@syntaxpolice.org. ABOUT: The Haskell Cabal is meant to be a part of a larger infrastructure for distributing, organizing, and cataloging Haskell Libraries and Tools. It is an effort to provide a framework for developers to more effectively contribute their software to the Haskell community. Specifically, the Cabal describes what a Haskell package is, how these packages interact with the language, and what Haskell implementations must to do to support packages. The Cabal also specifies some infrastructure (code) that makes it easy for tool authors to build and distribute conforming packages. The Cabal is only one contribution to the larger goal. In particular, the Cabal says nothing about more global issues such as how authors decide where in the module name space their library should live; how users can find a package they want; how orphan packages find new owners; and so on. NOTES: You cannot currently execute the setup scripts with "./Setup.lhs" since Cabal Hugs support isn't ready-for-prime-time. You can compile it with ghc thusly: "ghc -package Cabal Setup.lhs -o setup" and then use the "setup" executable after that. This release is meant to provide the community with concrete information about how the interfaces are shaping up. This release does NOT fix the interfaces, we can't promise not to break anything that relies on these interfaces. We hope that Haskell authors will try to package their software using these tools, and let us know where they fall short. MORE INFORMATION: Please see the web site for the source code, interfaces, and especially the proposal, which will serve as documentation for this release: http://www.haskell.org/cabal/ ------------------------------------------------------------ -*-change-log-*- 0.4 Isaac Jones Sun Jan 16 2005 * Much thanks to all the awesome fptools hackers who have been working hard to build the Haskell Cabal! * Interface Changes: ** WARNING: this is a pre-release and the interfaces are still likely to change until we reach a 1.0 release. ** Instead of Package.description, you should name your description files <something>.cabal. In particular, we suggest that you name it <packagename>.cabal, but this is not enforced (yet). Multiple .cabal files in the same directory is an error, at least for now. ** ./setup install --install-prefix is gone. Use ./setup copy --copy-prefix instead. ** The "Modules" field is gone. Use "hidden-modules", "exposed-modules", and "executable-modules". ** Build-depends is now a package-only field, and can't go into executable stanzas. Build-depends is a package-to-package relationship. ** Some new fields. Use the Source. * New Features ** Cabal is now included as a package in the CVS version of fptools. That means it'll be released as "-package Cabal" in future versions of the compilers, and if you are a bleeding-edge user, you can grab it from the CVS repository with the compilers. ** Hugs compatibility and NHC98 compatibility should both be improved. ** Hooks Interface / Autoconf compatibility: Most of the hooks interface is hidden for now, because it's not finalized. I have exposed only "defaultMainWithHooks" and "defaultUserHooks". This allows you to use a ./configure script to preprocess "foo.buildinfo", which gets merged with "foo.cabal". In future releases, we'll expose UserHooks, but we're definitely going to change the interface to those. The interface to the two functions I've exposed should stay the same, though. ** ./setup haddock is a baby feature which pre-processes the source code with hscpp and runs haddock on it. This is brand new and hardly tested, so you get to knock it around and see what you think. ** Some commands now actually implement verbosity. ** The preprocessors have been tested a bit more, and seem to work OK. Please give feedback if you use these. 0.3 Isaac Jones Sun Jan 16 2005 * Unstable snapshot release * From now on, stable releases are even. 0.2 Isaac Jones * Adds more HUGS support and preprocessor support.