Cabal file parser can't handle colon in description

[dsf]

The description field of the cabal file in the haskell-mtl package currently in debian sid contains an url with a colon, which leads to this error:

  ghc-pkg: 13: unrecognised field or section: "(<http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~mpj/pubs/springschool.html>),"

This comes from Cabal.Distribution.ParseUtils.

[igloo]

Thanks for the report; we'll take a look.

[igloo]

I can't reproduce this. Can you please say exactly what commands you're using?

[dsf]

Cabal file which triggers the colon bug

[dsf]

Replying to igloo:

I can't reproduce this. Can you please say exactly what commands you're using?

It happens if I put the attached mtl.cabal file into /tmp and run

cd /tmp; echo "[]" > tmp.conf; ghc-pkg register tmp.conf

strace says its not opening anything other than standard system libraries.

[igloo]

I don't understand; you don't seem to be using mtl.cabal in that command.

When I run it I get:

Reading package info from "tmp.conf" ... ghc-pkg: 1: unrecognised field or section: "[]"

which seems reasonable to me.

Also, note that mtl.cabal is meant to be used by Cabal, not by ghc-pkg directly.

[dsf]

I'm sorry, I simplified the problem away and then didn't notice that the message had changed. It turns out that the problem arises when processing the installed-pkg-config file generated by dh_haskell_install, which dh_haskell_shlibdeps then picks up using the find_config_for_ghc6 function. I don't speak perl very well, but I suspect this:

                   if (/([^\s:]+):(.*)/) {
                        $field = $1;
                        print OUTCONFIG "$field:";
                        $_ = $2;
                    }

[dsf]

(This makes it a haskell-devscripts bug, so I guess it doesn't belong here.)

[simonmar]

Thanks; closing.