Dhall to Cabal

[aljce]

I think a dhall-to-cabal library would be great. You would write a dhall record and then run the utility and it would generate you a cabal file. This would allow you to use dhalls abstraction capabilities to write shorter and easy to read dhallcabal files.

There are two ways to accomplish this. You could write a library similar to dhall-nix or you could use the new string interpolation to write an almost totally dhall package!

I am interested in doing this but I have been pressed for time currently at work if no one else does it I will get around to in in a couple weeks. This being said I am curious what you all think the best course of action would be to accomplish this.

On a completely unrelated note that doesn't deserve its own issue. Gabriel, you should consider making dhall a github organization. It is super easy and would allow for you to bless things like dhall-rs, dhall-scala, and dhall-cabal.

[Gabriella439]

Yeah, I will create a GitHub organization soon now that Dhall has enough integrations to warrant it

Generally, I recommend using an approach similar to dhall-nix where you do an AST-to-AST translation so that downstream tools can in theory consume the .cabal file's Haskell AST instead of the text representation. This promotes a "tighter" software pipeline that stays entirely in Haskell and also prevents having to reparse/revalidate the file.

For me, one big benefit that would come out of this is a clearer schema for cabal files in the form of a well-commented Dhall type, because the Cabal user guide is sort of disorganized in presenting this information.

However, if you do decide to go the string interpolation route, note that you can use my recently released dhall-text package so that you don't have to write any Haskell code for the final rendering of the Text value:

• https://github.com/Gabriel439/Haskell-Dhall-Text-Library

[ocharles]

I've begun work on this here: https://github.com/ocharles/dhall-to-cabal. Happy to have some contributors help me.

[sboosali]

Looks like dhall-to-cabal has been released. Should we close this issue?

[Gabriella439]

Yep! Closing