Package sets contain a mixture of things

[michaelpj]

At the moment the package sets produced by e.g. cabalProject contain:

1. Attributes for every Haskell package in the package set
2. Some additional things, at least shellFor and ghcWithPacakges

This seems suboptimal to me, for two reasons:

• We don't control the set of names needed for 1, so we could in principle get clashes. But I'm sure nobody will ever add a package called "shellFor". Right?
• 1 and 2 are just very different kind of things. At least in my head the package set was a map-like attribute set rather than a namespace-like attribute set, so I'd expected it to be homogeneous.

This mostly just causes confusion . I spent quite a while looking for shellFor, since surely it couldn't be just mixed up in all the package attributes? But it is.

I'd prefer to have a level of indirection, e.g.

{
    packages = { ... }
    shellFor = ...
    ghcWithPackages = ...
}

This would be a breaking change, though.

[rvl]

Sounds like a reasonable change. It currently matches the layout in the Nixpkgs Haskell infrastructure pkgs.haskellPackages.shellFor.

[michaelpj]

Sounds like a reasonable change. It currently matches the layout in the Nixpkgs Haskell infrastructure pkgs.haskellPackages.shellFor.

That's a very sensible reason to have it be that way. I guess I disagree with nixpkgs too ;)

[stale[bot]]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[michaelpj]

I still care!

[hamishmack]

Should we drop cabalProject and rename cabalProject' to cabalProject?

[L-as]

I think we should drop project too. It's a minor convenience that doesn't really give you anything. Whether your project uses Stack or Cabal isn't something that changes, hence you write it once and that's it.

[michaelpj]

Should we drop cabalProject and rename cabalProject' to cabalProject?

:+1: in my book, I can't remember whether the hsPkgs inside there also has some non-package stuff in it, should check. But maybe some people like the short version.