Hackathon2015

This is a page to collect ideas for Cabal/Hackage hacking tasks/mini-projects for the Haskell Infrastructure Hackathon

Feel free to expand individual bullet points into full (linked) pages or tickets/issues.

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• Cabal documentation.

  Cabal's user guide could be a lot better. It's currently a mix of tutorial and reference without being great at either. It also mostly only covers the .cabal file stuff and Setup.hs CLI, hardly touching on cabal-install.

  Anyone considering this should feel empowered to make decisions. You could decide to start from scratch with a new structure and just pinch material from the existing docs. You might want to fully split into tutorial and reference.

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• A man page for cabal-install #848

  cabal-install has been lacking a man page since forever. Would be nice to add one, perhaps auto-generated from --help output by cabal-install itself. Or cabal help foo could show a man page, like git help does.

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• Include-able Common Stanzas #2832

  Allow to reduce duplication by moving common definitions to includable common stanzas which can then be included from other stanzas.

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• (Opt-in) automatic installation of build-deps for cabal {build,test,bench}

  cabal {build,test,bench} already automatically reconfigures. Extend the automatism by adding convenience --install-dependencies/--dependencies-install flags (which can be abbreviated to e.g. --install or maybe --dep) to cabal {build,test,bench}. Maybe have a configuration setting in ~/.cabal/config to enable this mode of operation by default (as it's too controversial to have this on by default for everyone, so give people a choice and postpone a change of default till there's consensus to change)