local config files

[guest]

It would be nice if I could locally (for a project/directory) store the options I want to pass to "cabal configure".

An example use case would be in the darcs project which has a flag "-ftype-witnesses". We don't want to inflict this on most users because it increases our compile time, but for developers of certain branches of darcs want to be systematically using this flag so that they can catch errors. These developers could just "cabal configure -ftype-witnesses", but then if they do a "cabal clean" for any reason, the next time they run "cabal configure", they may forget to pass the flag along.

To be clear, this is something to be used by individual developers; it's not something we want for the .cabal file itself. Duncan says that this would be a bit like a local .ghci file, if it helps.

[duncan]

This is related to #294 but would use the cabal-install set of config flags, not just the Cabal lib config flags.

We would also want to make hackage check for these files and reject them if found.

[kosmikus]

Also see #780.

[kosmikus]

Also see #910.