ghc-options parsing of quoted strings is slightly non-obvious

[bgamari]

Say, for instance, that I would like to pass -with-rtsopts="-I0 -qg" to ghc. I might try adding the following to my cabal file,

ghc-options: -with-rtsopts="-I0 -qg"

However, this would result in Cabal passing '-with-rtsopts="-I0' '-qg"' to ghc instead, resulting in a rather confusing error.

To accomplish my goal it seems I instead need to quote the entire argument,

ghc-options: "-with-rtsopts=-I0 -qg"

While I can see the rationale here, it is a bit surprising and the errors that are produced when one gets it wrong aren't so great. Is there any reason not to allow quoting anywhere in ghc-options?

[ezyang]

I don't see why not, though it may be tricky to convince the parser to play ball.

[23Skidoo]

/cc @phadej

[phadej]

Current behavior:

monoidalFieldAla "ghc-options"   (alaList' NoCommaFSep Token') (extract GHC)

I.e. ghc-options are parsed as no-comma (i.e. only space) separated list of tokens, where token is either haskell-string or [^\s,]+

IMHO it's less surprising for one, who is not familiar with shell escaping/unquoting rules:

 % echo "foo""'""bar"
foo'bar

[phadej]

That said, it's now possible to change a field grammar per cabal-version.