@underlap @acowley Unless you happen to support Hackage and Stackage the result would be very niche, unusable in anything beyond perhaps online playgrounds. And then users would have to encounter "poor" experience of the real world anyway.

If only we had a library for Common Architecture for Building Applications and Libraries or something like that...

@underlap @acowley Anyway, how adding one more build tool would help?..

We've had `stack` already, with this specific mission of improving user experience. And improve it did. Now we have two concurrent build systems. Meanwhile, users continue to receive the `cabal install whatever` advice and hurt themselves with it.

@dpwiz @acowley As a newbie to Haskell, Stack is nice, but being layered on top of Cabal approximately doubles the learning curve.

@underlap @acowley it uses cabal the library, but not the cabal the binary. The naming is unfortunate...

@dpwiz @acowley The files in the project are the main source of confusion for me. `stack new` creates stack.yaml, package.yaml, and a projectname.cabal file (apparently generated from the package.yaml, but still needing to be checked in, according to .gitignore).

I eventually found https://docs.haskellstack.org/en/stable/stack_yaml_vs_cabal_package_file/ but the explanation is far from clear.

If I'd only used the likes of maven, gradle, bazel, etc. I probably wouldn't have blinked at stack. But using cargo spoiled me.

@underlap @acowley ah, that's cabal the file format

What would you like instead of that? Use toml and skip the custom format entirely?

@underlap @acowley found the discussion about that https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/7548

@dpwiz @acowley Nice. Thanks!

@dpwiz @acowley Have a single file.