haskell4nix/cabal2nix — Issue #38: Bad handling of Cabal
Author: kosmikus
Created: 2012-02-16 12:06:25+00:00
State: open
Labels: cabal2nix

This is related to the mail I've sent on the nix-dev mailing list. I've now looked at the recent changes and must say that I strongly disagree with the new handling of Cabal.

There are a number of issues:

(1) Removing so-called "core packages". I think that's fine as long as it's possible to still obtain the original configuration shipped with a particular GHC version. So in that sense, promoting Cabal to a normal package is fine with me.

(2) Adding Cabal as an explicit dependency to all packages. This is what I think is wrong. It is not. Packages use Cabal as their build system, but it's not comparable to other package dependencies. The "buildDepends" field should reflect the actual build dependencies. The "correct" way to deal with this would be to pass Cabal to cabal (note the spelling difference) only, because that's the function that governs how Haskell packages are being built.

Apart from these two points, I'm still trying to figure out what triggered this particular change.