RE: ghc-pkg/Cabal list syntax

On 18 February 2005 08:44, Sven Panne wrote:

> The syntax of different tools is a bit inconsistent: In the
> BLAH.buildinfo files, the values of e.g. ld-options are
> space-separated (but not most other list-valued entries in
> BLAH.cabal). "ghc-pkg describe" lists these as exta-ld-opts (why a
> different name here?), and these are *comma*-separated. I think this
> should be cleaned up a little bit. 
>
> And while we are at syntax: Regardless of the list separator, we
> should be able to include it into the values of the list elements,
> e.g. via "" or '' like shells. 
> The "space" behaviour ;-) of the Cabal syntax is a bit unclear to me
> in general 
> and seems to be rather ad-hoc...

Fair points.  Actually I don't like the comma syntax of the list fields
at all: the commas are superfluous, and it just makes it harder to
splice things in using preprocessing.  It might be too late to change
this though - thoughts anyone?

In any case, I propose we:

 - change extra-ld-opts and extra-cc-opts in InstalledPackageInfo
   to be ld-options and cc-options for consistency with BuildInfo

 - use listField rather than simpleField to parse ld-options and
   cc-options.  Also, options should be allowed to be quoted, so
   we need to introduce parseOptionQ.  InstalledPackageInfo uses
   parseFilePathQ for these fields which is wrong.

Cheers,
	Simon