Redundancy in the build system for packages

[Sven Panne]

Looking at our current technology for building packages below ghc/libraries, I 
think that for each package there are 2 redundant files: package.conf.in and 
prologue.txt. If I see things correctly, almost all information is already in 
the foo.cabal files, so the question is: What are the plans for removing this 
redundancy? I think this has been discussed before, but I can't remember the 
outcome.

The background behind this: When adding or removing Cabal packages via RPM, 
one has to regenerate the Haddock "Contents" page and the "Index" pages to 
match the set of currently installed Cabal packages. This is similar to what 
has to be done for info pages via install-info. To do this, one needs the 
package descriptions, which should be taken from the "description" fields of 
the installed Cabal packages (note that these should contain Haddock markup 
then). But currently foo.cabal and package.conf.in are very out-of-sync for 
most packages (empty/different descriptions, even differing package versions 
(fgl!), bug reports due to inconsistent list of modules, etc.).

Cheers,
   S.