Cabal package description sytax

I'm having problems understanding the Cabal package description syntax (I can't find a formal spec), especially the use of quotes. Some field values can be quoted, others can't, but I can't see any general principle here. 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). 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. Cheers, S.