This past week we released Cabal 0.5, which I'm calling a release-candidate for 0.6, since 0.6 is the one that's going to be in the Glasgow Haskell Compiler version 6.4, set to release Really Soon.

The cabal is a standard interface for building and installing Haskell tools. I'm very pleased that there are already some tools layered on top of it, like dh_haskell, for building Debian packages based on Cabal Haskell packages. cabal2rpm is a similar tool for rpms, Hackage (implemented on Linux with a Haskell SQL interface) is a Haskell Package database. Hackage will eventually implement an apt-get type interface for installing packages and their dependencies. Haskell support for visual studio is also layered on the Cabal.

Maybe someone (maybe me) will implement some Eclipse plugin for Haskell based on Cabal. Though I can never get Eclipse to work.

I'm really happy that a lot of people are hacking on Cabal and making really great feature requests and bug reports.

There's a nice little haskell-cafe thread about ways we could implement the Unix utility cat. There are several implementations posted (see also the second page of discussion). If you're trying to learn about I/O in Haskell, this could be a useful place to start.

I don't like the name "Haskell Sequence". I think we could have a nice site naming contest here. Put your suggestions in comments to this post, and we'll set up a poll with the ones that are the most popular.

Isaac Jones has posted Cabal 0.5. New features include hooks interface updates,bugfixes, a user's manual, and a little bit of refactoring. The Debian package has already been uploaded also. Here's the full changelog:

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