On 10 January 2011 22:22, Henning Thielemann
Peter Simons schrieb:
Arguably, the choice to include the package name in the name of the Cabal file is inconsistent with that decision, and that inconsistency is confusing.
Actually, the name does not have to be pkgname.cabal. You can choose any name with extension .cabal. Cabal complains about multiple files with that extension. So you could in principle call it description.cabal consistently in all your packages.
That's true, though I don't think I'd recommend it. The current convention of <pkgname>.cabal is good and will work well with multiple packages sharing one source tree. My plan for the command line interface is that cabal configure/build/install in a dir with multiple .cabal files will act on all of them. Individual packages, or components within packages will be selectable by name, e.g. "cabal configure" (configures all packages) "cabal build foo" (builds just target foo). I'm not quite sure how to handle name clashes, but I expect we can work something out. For example, a package A containing exe A and B. Does A refer to the package (components A and B) or just to the component A? Duncan