hpack VS Cabal

Then the other day I had an epiphany: hpack takes care of that boilerplate — not stack!

There are ways to get around this, but it's not easy and doesnt scale: https://github.com/sol/hpack/issues/194

-- see: https://github.com/sol/hpack ```

The yaml you are talking about is part of a tool called hpack. This tool can be used on it's own (and with cabal-install as such), it just so happens that stack has it's own internal copy of it and runs it automatically whenever it finds a package.yaml.

I know this sounds more complicated at first glance, but I personally would suggest using hpack to generate cabal files from a package.yaml instead of directly editing your-project.cabal.

Also, there's already a cabal RFC to support toml: https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/7548

Cabal has a lot of dark corners once you stray from the happy path. Just checked and I'm currently subscribed to 37 threads on the issue tracker, and I'm not a maintainer. A lot of these are related to lesser-used features like cabal scripts, environment files and doctests (though I think all of these things would used more if they were more reliable), but there's also plenty of stupid stuff like: - https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/3313 - https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/8527 - https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/8391 - https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/7789 - https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/6888 - https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/6999 - https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/5271

Given that Mike Pilgrim (the Stack maintainer) is on Windows, and Cabal has issues on Windows, I think it might be easier to get Windows specific fixes merged in Stack.

The error message is not too helpful. This is the target of a long-standing ticket: https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/7993 Your help would be very welcome.

By the way, there are some open issues for the command to add a package in Cabal.

That's interesting. Could you could open a an issue about this? https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues

I created this issue a few months ago: https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/8270

Reported this as a bug in cabal.

We definitely plan to have benchmarks once we start working on performance. We haven't started yet because there were more urgent tasks. For example: ensuring that the testsuite runs on CI with the JS backend (should be completed this week or the next), ensuring that the toolchain works properly (we're writing a tutorial and we've found new bugs, e.g. yesterday I've fixed the support for js-sources in Cabal https://github.com/haskell/cabal/pull/8636), adding TH support...