- Regarding configuration, I've found ConfigFile to be useful for my projects. I use it for all my daemons in production. It doesn't update automatically.
- I use cabal-dev for creating reproducible builds across environments (local, dev, colleague-local). Really cabal-dev is indispensable, especially for its ability to support local, patched versions of libraries within the project directory.
- For what it's worth, I would go with xmonad-style state reloading. Purity of Haskell makes this trivial; migration is an issue but it is anyway. I experimented with hsplugins and hint for my IRCd and in the former case there was a GHC runtime problem, and in the latter a segmentation fault. I left the branches on Github for later postmortem: https://github.com/chrisdone/hulk
Example of ConfigFile:
# Default options
[DEFAULT]
hostname: localhost
# Options for the first file
[file1]
location: /usr/local
user: Fred
