Advance notice that I'd like to make Cabal depend on parsec

Duncan Coutts duncan.coutts at googlemail.com
Fri Mar 15 16:30:00 CET 2013


On Fri, 2013-03-15 at 12:37 +0800, Conrad Parker wrote:
> On 14 March 2013 22:53, Duncan Coutts <duncan.coutts at googlemail.com> wrote:
> >
> > I've been doing regression testing against hackage and I'm satisfied
> > that the new parser matches close enough. I've uncovered all kinds of
> > horrors with .cabal files in the wild relying on quirks of the old
> > parser. I've made adjustments for most of them but I will be breaking a
> > half dozen old packages
> 
> When you say you've "made adjustments for" dodgy .cabal files in the
> wild, do you mean that you'll send those maintainers patches that make
> their cabal files less dodgy, or do you mean you've added hacks to
> your parser to reproduce the quirky behaviour?

The latter, but the egregiousness of the hacks is actually not too bad
in the end. I don't find it revolting. For the worst examples I didn't
make adjustments and those ones will break. I think I've made a
reasonable judgement about the where to draw the line between the two.

I can look into generating warnings in those cases (which is probably
better than me emailing them).

Duncan




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