https://jappie.me/cabal-exact-printing.html

[utterances-bot]

Cabal exact printing / Jappie

https://jappie.me/cabal-exact-printing.html

[anka-213]

I’m preliminary interested in volunteering some time towards this. I have previous experience working with all sorts of parsers, so although I haven’t looked at the cabal codebase specifically before, I don’t think it’ll take me too much time to get up to speed on the approach taken here.

[dschrempf]

Did you think about a solution not using "exact printing"?

That is, would it be much easier to make the mentioned changes and print them using a Cabal file formatting tool? In this case, one could only use modify functionality when they accept to also auto-format the Cabal file.

[anka-213]

@dschrempf That would still require sufficiently exact printing to preserve comments and common stanzas and things like that, so it would still require a different parser than cabal’s current one. As the blog post mentioned, there are already some external tools that can do that, but from my understanding the goal here was to have it built into cabal.

[jappeace]

@anka-213 will you be at zurich hack? I intend to work in this there.

[anka-213]

@anka-213 will you be at zurich hack? I intend to work in this there.

Unfortunately not. I’ll be on a choir trip to Berlin at the time