For my Summer of Code project, I'm giving cabal an repl command. At first, I thought a simple filename argument would be enough. More complex Cabal packages require a slightly more detailed input, however. Often times, there's more to a Cabal package than a library. Sometimes there's tests. Sometimes an executable. And all these components can have different ways of building themselves. This makes interpretation a bit of a problem. If a file is part of multiple components, which method of building should be used? Both should work, certainly, but choosing a component arbitrarily leaves little control to the user. In cases like this, it seems that cabal repl must take a component as well. Let's give it a flag --component=COMPONENT, where COMPONENT is the name of some library or executable or test suite that's a component in the cabal package. Fair enough.
But there's more. But what if a user wants to test a component in its entirety, not just one particular file? Here they only need to specify the component. So we say cabal repl --component=COMPONENT. What happens? What's loaded into GHCi? Should nothing be loaded, requiring the user to :load every module he wants to work with? Should everything be loaded, leading to potentially nasty name collisions? Should everything be loaded, but qualified, meaning that users will have to type hilariously long prefixes before all their functions? Should there be yet another flag for what course of action to take? Please, comment and tell me, because I have no idea.
