On 13/03/2010 20:39, Dan Knapp wrote:
There doesn't seem to be a mailing list for Cabal itself, so I'm
posting here. I came up with an idea for a small feature that I
believe would make a useful addition to ghc-pkg and Cabal. I'm
willing to implement it myself, but I have had some previous
experiences with other projects where I did some work and then the
maintainers said "sorry, not interested", so I want to gauge interest
before I start. Who should I talk to?
The feature itself is this: Arbitrary key-value pairs in Cabal
package files and the installed-package database. The use-case is for
an application supporting plugins to discover installed plugins
compatible with it, interrogating these fields through the GHC API.
For example, my content-management system FruitTart could enumerate
the list of installed packages looking for packages which export a
field "fruit-tart-plugin-interface-version" with a numeric value
matching the interface version it's expecting.
Once again, I'm not asking anyone to do this work for me - I'm eager
to get my hands dirty and do it myself. I just want to find out what
the process would be to get it accepted, once it works.
My first thought was "hmm, there must be another way to do that", but I
can't think of one, or at least a good one.
Perhaps having arbitrary key-value pairs in the package database would
be a good thing. It would help us to avoid breaking things when we need
to change the format, for one thing. We could start using key-values
for new fields rather than adding them to InstalledPackageInfo.
However, then we have a strange situation where some fields get
distinguished status in InstalledPackageInfo. Of course, for some of
those fields we have richer types (e.g. License), so it makes sense.
So for me, I can't see any serious objections to doing this, but I'd
also ask on the [email protected] list (in particular we should
hear what Duncan Coutts thinks).
Cheers,
Simon
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