Ticket #258 (closed defect: wontfix)

Opened 9 months ago

Last modified 5 months ago

case confusion - cabal vs Cabal

Reported by: guest Assigned to:
Priority: normal Milestone:
Component: Cabal library Version: HEAD
Severity: normal Keywords:
Cc: Difficulty: normal
GHC Version: 6.8.2 Platform:

Description

The darcs repo for Cabal is at darcs.haskell.org:/home/darcs/cabal yet it contains a file Cabal.cabal, which indeed claims that the name of the package is Cabal. This confusion of letter case is causing problems for me. Can we agree that Cabal is capitalised, and rename the repo dir? That seems like the simplest way to achieve consistency.

Change History

04/12/08 14:31:17 changed by kolmodin

  • status changed from new to closed.
  • resolution set to wontfix.

The name of the package is indeed Cabal, with a capital C.

Renaming either the name of the .cabal file or the repo dir is not trivial though.

  • Changing the name of the .cabal file would also require to rename the package, since hackage requires the file name to be consistent with the package name. This would effectively break all packages depending on Cabal, and of course make much hassle with forward and backwards compatibility.
  • Renaming the repo name would break the darcs installations of all our developers, something we are really not keen to do. We could set up a symlink to use the Cabal name, but I'd find that even more confusing than just having a single repository.

http://www.orlyowl.com/upload/files/NOOOO!!!.JPG

06/23/08 02:27:13 changed by maltem

This does raise another question: Should upper case be allowed in package names at all? It makes handling of packages a rather tedious task (was it openGL or Opengl or ...) It's also interesting to note that most package maintainers tend towards all-lowercase, including the packages that came out of the base split.

06/23/08 02:56:23 changed by duncan

Note that cabal-install is mostly case insensitive in its user interface. For example: 

cabal list opengl
cabal install opengl

Will work just fine. That's because "opengl" is not ambiguous. If there were an "Opengl" and an "OpenGl?" package then cabal list opengl would list both, but cabal install opengl would complain and you'd have to use cabal install OpenGL exactly.

It's ok for distro packages to use all lower case even if the haskell package uses mixed case. The promise is that there will be no overlaps (with the one exception that packages can rename themselves to a different case, but in that case it's still really the same package.)

06/23/08 03:02:07 changed by guest

Hoogle uses lowercase for packages and initial-upper-case for modules. i.e. +tagsoup will search the tagsoup package, +TagSoup? will search the tagsoup module. I think cabal packages should be strongly suggested to be all lower-case. This has lead to a great source of confusion, with everyone picking entirely different naming conventions:

http://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2008/05/interactive-tagsoup-parsing.html

i.e. about 1/6 of packages have an initial capital. I'd mandate cabal packages to be case insensitive (they probably are on windows anyway!) and start displaying them all lower case. The cabal convention for fields is hyphen-separators, so that should be the standard way of distinguishing packages.

-- Neil