Is there a reason why our importers do not use their ecosystem's native packaging software libraries? For example, I just spent a good while updating and fixing our Haskell importers and while they do now seem quite reliable there are still some quirks in the custom parser. The Cabal package description format is implementation defined and full of compatibility switches, so I would expect it to be much easier to implement and maintain a Haskell program that uses the Cabal library to parse package descriptions into s-expressions for the rest of the importer.
I suppose other languages would have a similar library since they need to work with those package definitions too. Yet no importer seems to do anything like that. Is this just because many package indices provide a easy to parse json description or is there a technical/policy limitation? - Saku
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