#1839: need ghc-pkg dump feature
--------------------------------+-------------------------------------------
Reporter: duncan | Owner:
Type: feature request | Status: new
Priority: normal | Milestone:
Component: Compiler | Version: 6.8.1
Severity: normal | Keywords:
Difficulty: Unknown | Testcase:
Architecture: Unknown | Os: Unknown
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Cabal already needs quite a bit of information from ghc-pkg about the
package database. In the future we would like even more information. It
would be more efficient for Cabal to ask ghc-pkg once for all the
information rather than to ask lots of little questions. (ghc-pkg is quite
slow when lots of packages are registered)
For each package we want to know it's name, version, what packages it
depends on, any C flags or include dirs, the exposed modules, the haddock
html & interface dir.
We also need to be able to ask this information for a specific package
database and get results for only that db. This is because Cabal needs to
distinguish global and user packages. In future when we want to build
several packages inplace we'll also want to use specific inplace package
dbs.
So a dump command should probably just describe every package in a
specified db. We already know how to parse an InstalledPackageDescription
which is the format that ghc-pkg describe produces. One potential problem
is distinguishing package boundaries if all the package descriptions are
concatenated. Perhaps something simple like a blank line would suffice.
So here's a concrete suggestion:
{{{
ghc-pkg dump --global
}}}
should produce the concatenation (with blank line separators) of {{{ghc-
pkg describe}}} for each package in the global package db. Note that is
should list '''only''' those packages in the global db, not those from the
user db.
{{{
ghc-pkg dump --user
ghc-pkg dump --package-conf=foo.package.conf
}}}
So these should do similarly, but act '''only''' upon the specified
package dbs.
--
Ticket URL: <http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/1839>
GHC <http://www.haskell.org/ghc/>
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