On 2006-02-02, John Meacham
it is forcing them to. which is bad. no matter how beautiful haskell is. Quadruply especially so since it does not gain you anything. since it is not needed.
I don't see cabal files becoming anywhere near turing complete. then it wouldn't be declarative (at least in the sense I mean). at most, string interpolation will be the only operation on its fields.
I am actually trying to simplify cabal a lot with these changes. a program is hugely simpler than a library. Just from a maintenence point of view, must of the issues dealing with syncing cabal and ghc releases, cabal library version changes, etc would just have never been issues. what about multiple compilers and keeping your cabal installs in sync among all of them? it is just a big mess.
not to mention how much simpler cabal development will be once it is decoupled from the compiler libraries and can evolve independently.
I don't have much too add beyond "this is exactly how I think of the issue, and why the whole point of cabal has seemed wrong up to now." Thank you for articulating this. -- Aaron Denney -><-