A design for paths in Cabal

Where a big part of Cabal is about interpreting your-package.cabal file, also an important part of it and also cabal-install are filepaths. After all, cabal-install is a build tool.

Currently (as of Cabal-3.4) the type used for all filepath needs is infamous

type FilePath = String

One can say that all paths in the codebase are dynamically typed. It is very hard to say whether paths are absolute or relative, and if relative to what.

A solution would be to use path or paths library.

I like paths better, because it is set up to talk about relative paths to arbitrary roots, not only absolute paths.

Still, neither is good enough. Why I say so? Because Cabal and cabal-install have to deal with three kinds of paths.

1. Abstract paths
2. Paths on the host system
3. Paths on the target system

It is that simple, but path is very concretely the second kind, and paths is somewhere in between first and second, but doesn't let you differentiate them.

#Abstract paths

Abstract paths are the ones written in your-package.cabal file. For example hs-source-dirs: src/. It is not Unix path. It is not Windows path. It is in fact something which should be interpretable as either, and also path inside tarball archive. In fact it currently have to be common denominator of it, which means that backslashes \, i.e. Windows filepaths aren't portable, but I suspect they work if you build on Windows.

Just thinking about types uncovers a possible bug.

If we had a

-- | An abstract path.
data APath root = ...

Then we could enforce format, for example prohibiting some (i.e. all known) special characters.

Note: abstract paths are relative. There might be some abstract root, for example PackageRoot, but its interpretation still depends.

The representation of APath is not important. It, however, should be some kind of text.

#Paths on the host system

These are the concrete paths on your disk.

-- | A path on host (build) system
data HPath root = ...

The HPath can have different roots as well, for example CWD (for current working directory), HomeDir or Absolute. Maybe even talking about HPath PackageRoot is meaningful. My gut feeling says that we rather should be able to provide an operation to resolve APath PackageRoot into HPath Absolute, given a HPath Absolute of package root.

Also directory operations, i.e. IO operations, like listDirectory are only meaningful for HPaths. These are concrete paths.

HPaths have to be represented in a systems native way. It can still be FilePath in the first iteration, but e.g. absolute paths on Windows may start with \\?\ and use backslashes as directory separators (c.f. APath which probably will look like POSIX path everywhere).

#Paths on the target system

The third kind of paths are paths on the target system. While cross-compilation support in Cabal is barely existing, having own type for paths for target system should help that improve.

One example are YourPackage_Paths modules. Currently it contains hardcoded paths to e.g. data-files directory of installed package, i.e. somewhere on the target system.

While having hardcodes absolute paths in YourPackage_Paths is a bad idea nowadays, and the data-files discovery should be based on some relative (relocatable, using abstract APaths maybe?) system, having a

-- | A path on the target (run) system
data TPath root = ...

will at least show where we use (absolute) target system paths. Perfectly we won't have them anywhere, if that is possible. But identifying where we have them now will help to get rid of them.

Another example is running (custom) ./Setup or tests or benchmarks. I hope that we can engineer the code in a way that executables built for target system won't be callable, but will need to use a runner wrapper (which we have, but I don't know much about it). Even a host = target (common) system case, where the wrapper is trivial.

Note: whether TPath is Windows path or POSIX path will depend on run-time information, so the conversion functions will need that bit of information. You couldn't be able to purely convert :: APath -> TPath, we will need to pass an extra context.

Here again, better types should help guide the design process.

#Conclusion

These are my current thoughts about how the paths will look in some future version of Cabal. Instead of one FilePath (or Path) there will be three: APath, HPath and TPath¹.

As I write down, this seems so obvious, this is how about paths have to be classified. Have anyone done something like this before? Please tell me, so I could learn from your experiences.

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