New subject: required fields in Cabal

23 Feb 2005

      On 22 February 2005 13:17, Krasimir Angelov wrote:
...
On Mon, 21 Feb 2005 17:56:08 -0800, Isaac Jones
 wrote:
...
* What any good package should have:
       package (name and version) :: PackageIdentifier,
       license        :: License,
-- OR?
       licenseFile    :: FilePath,
       copyright      :: String,
       maintainer     :: String,
       synopsis       :: String,
The good package should have these fields but they aren't required if
you only want to build some code with Cabal. This will be the typical
case with VSHaskell. The developer will use Cabal in order to build
his/her projects but may never fill these fields. These fields are
important when the developer decide to distribute the package. I think
that Cabal should check only for "package" field, but Hackage should
check for all fields.
Krasimir's right, I'd forgotten about this.  Cabal is going to be used
not just for distributing libraries & tools, but also just as a simple
build system for local code (and why not?), and as the main build system
for Visual Haskell.  In which case there's no need to have the license,
copyright, maintainer or synopsis fields - since you're not necessarily
giving the code to anyone.

Perhaps if you attempt to do './setup sdist' then it should complain if
these fields are missing, but otherwise omitting them shouldn't be
fatal.

Cheers,
	Simon

RE: required fields in Cabal

Simon Marlow

Isaac Jones

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