Thanks for your feedback. I'm mailing cabal-devel before I proceed. Hopefully the next time I post here will be with an implementation. :)
On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 11:38 AM, Simon Marlow <marlo...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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 cabal-de...@haskell.org list (in particular we should hear what > Duncan Coutts thinks). > > Cheers, > Simon > -- Dan Knapp "An infallible method of conciliating a tiger is to allow oneself to be devoured." (Konrad Adenauer) _______________________________________________ Glasgow-haskell-users mailing list Glasgow-haskell-users@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users