Figure out how to support sdist command

[chshersh]

No description provided.

[hasufell]

This is a bigger problem than it sounds, imo, because cabal install uses sdist.

@phadej any ideas?

[hasufell]

I have a crazy idea... what if autopack would add the exposed modules during setup to the cabal file :>

It could be guarded with an environment variable, so it doesn't clutter the git history for non-sdist workflows. Writing to a file is always problematic, requires committing it, can fail etc, so I think it would be reasonable to have this optional.

[vrom911]

Interesting idea, though I am not sure that it would work as I am not sure on which stage sdist reads cabal file.

I guess we need to investigate more on the UserHooks data type. There is the preCopy field in there which may be something to do with sdist. So probably we can just override behaviour there as well 🤔 What do you think @chshersh ?

[chshersh]

@vrom911, I agree with your solution. Ideally, I'd love to see something like sdistHook in UserHooks, but if it's already possible to reuse one of the existing hooks to achieve the desired behaviour, it's worth investigating.

[hasufell]

Well, I made it work with: https://www.haskell.org/cabal/users-guide/developing-packages.html#pkg-field-extra-source-files

So if you have hs-source-dirs: lib, then you just add extra-source-files: lib/**/*.hs. But that still has the problem that it circumvents the current .cabal file standard. I think that needs to be discussed with cabal maintainers.

As autopack doesn't really conflict with cabal-fmt, my current workflow is basically: use autopack with the above hack. Once I need to upload to hackage, I make sure my .cabal file has the modules listed explicitly (via cabal-fmt or so), while still keeping autopack in place.