feature: cabal sandbox add-source <git-repo> (darcs too ideally…)

[kowey]

One potentially useful thing for teams working with complex families of packages would be able to add source code repositories (bonus: ability to pick out branches…). This is quite helpful for synchronisation and avoids time wasted in “oh wait, that's why you're having trouble; you need to pull the lastest git version of the foo dependency from my branch” style discussions in mid-development. For me, getting somebody up and running with this new feature would consist in handing them a list of URIs for sources, and that'd be it.

Alternatives that I'm aware of so far would be to write people scripts (a bit tricky if you have Windows/Unix mixed teams) or to use something like cabal-meta instead (but preferable not to have to give people a new cmd to learn like cabal-dev)

Otherwise, the new cabal sandbox is making me happy. Thanks, devs!

[23Skidoo]

Yes, I plan to implement this at some point.

Otherwise, the new cabal sandbox is making me happy.

Glad to hear that!

[23Skidoo]

I'm starting to think that it's better to fix this by implementing #1367 and using svn:externals or git submodules for external packages in your tree.

[AndrewRademacher]

This would also be valuable when you need to make updates to someone else's public repo. When you fork, fix and then submit a pull request, it would be great to be able to just point cabal at your fork so that you can keep working on your project. Then, when/if the package maintainer accepts the pull and updates Hackage revert to using it as a primary source.

[mietek]

Halcyon supports declaring sandbox sources with the HALCYON_SANDBOX_SOURCES option.

See Try Haskell for an example of declaring the git HEAD version of mueval as a sandbox source.

[phadej]

sandbox functionality is removed.