Splitting a big Cabal package into small ones

Neil Mitchell ndmitchell at gmail.com
Fri Aug 25 11:54:13 EDT 2006


Hi

> I'm curious, why do folks frequently implement complex external tools
> like this for features that probably belong in Cabal, rather than
> contributing to cabal itself?  I'm not criticizing, I'm just wondering
> what we develpers can do to make Cabal hacking more approachable.

Hacking Cabal was a bit frightening - in particular if you don't
precisely understand what happens during configure, preInstall,
postInstall and all the other stages and how they relate to each other
in quite a bit of detail, you can't really figure out where to even
start hacking. It's also a large code base, with lots of conventions
and lots of code - which gives people a big shock when starting.

That said, I did manage to get some Cabal patches in, so its not
impossible by any means.

Thanks

Neil


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