creswick/cabal-dev — Issue #45: Provide some mechanism for dealing with refreshing changing projects
Author: mightybyte
Created: 2011-11-28 20:16:06+00:00
State: open

This issue is similar to [issue 36](https://github.com/creswick/cabal-dev/issues/36). The problem is that I'll be working on something in say the snap package that involves unreleased code from the rest of the snap framework. In the snap project directory, I will have done add-source for local copies of snap-core, snap-server, heist, etc. Then I'll modify something in one of those projects and I want the changes to show up when I build the snap project. I don't want to delete the whole sandbox, because then the build will take forever. My usual practice is to dig inside the sandbox directory, specifically delete files having to do with the changed project, then issue add-source for that project again.

The reason I'm opening a new issue instead of just commenting on issue 36 is because being warned about it isn't really a big problem for me. I usually know when something changed, and I want to refresh it. Ideally the add-source action would just detect changes and do the right thing. I realize that could be difficult. A simpler solution that would be completely acceptable would be to add a "-f" flag to the add-source action that would force the reload of said project.

This is a big issue for me. I run into this all the time with the Snap framework and other proprietary projects I'm involved with that use multiple projects not on hackage. Improving the workflow here would be a big win.