Greetings. I'm keen to try to stabalize more of the Cabal interface, but I'm not sure the best way to go about that. I started a wiki page to start to document what is stable and what is not. Eventually this should move into the end-user documentation: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/wiki/StableInterfaces Does anyone have clever ideas for how to go about pushing these interfaces toward stability? Do we just need to declare that certain things are unstable for the near-term (and possibly implement the eternal compatibility in theory idea[1]) and continue to experiment with them until they seem done enough? Do we stare at them very hard? Below[2] are my thoughts about what we _know_ to be stable, and the types for the new hooks interface. peace, isaac [1] http://www.haskell.org/tmrwiki/EternalCompatibilityInTheory [2] Here's a summary of the bits of interface that need to be stabalized, or are already stabalized. Stable Commands * ./setup configure o --prefix o --user o --ghc, --hugs o --verbose * ./setup build * ./setup install Unstable Commands * everything else. well, they're really _pretty_ stable. Stable functions * defaultMain * defaultMainWithHooks defaultUserHooks o but regular defaultMainWithHooks isn't stable since userHooks changes. Unstable functions * Various utility functions * UserHooks runTests :: Args -> Bool -> PackageDescription -> LocalBuildInfo -> IO ExitCode, -- ^Used for @.\/setup test@ readDesc :: IO (Maybe PackageDescription), -- ^Read the description file hookedPreProcessors :: [ PPSuffixHandler ], -- ^Custom preprocessors in addition to and overriding 'knownSuffixHandlers'. hookedPrograms :: [Program], -- ^These programs are detected at configure time. Arguments for them are added to the configure command. -- |Hook to run before configure command preConf :: Args -> ConfigFlags -> IO HookedBuildInfo, -- |Over-ride this hook to get different behavior during configure. confHook :: PackageDescription -> ConfigFlags -> IO LocalBuildInfo, -- |Hook to run after configure command postConf :: Args -> ConfigFlags -> PackageDescription -> LocalBuildInfo -> IO ExitCode, ... * Everything else peace, isaac