Multi-instance packages status report

[Simon Marlow]

On 22/07/14 08:23, Joachim Breitner wrote:
> [Replying to the list, in case it was sent to me in private by accident]
>
>
> Hi Edward,
>
> Am Montag, den 21.07.2014, 23:25 +0100 schrieb Edward Z.Yang:
>> Excerpts from Joachim Breitner's message of 2014-07-21 21:06:49 +0100:
>>> maybe a stupid question, but how does the package key relate to the hash
>>> that "ghc-pkg" shows for package?
>>
>> Fine question---this is definitely something that is different from the
>> GSoC project.  The short answer is, the current hash shown in ghc-pkg is
>> the ABI hash associated with the InstalledPackageId, which is computed
>> after GHC is done compiling your code; whereas the package key is a
>> hash of the dependency graph, which can be done before compilation.
>>
>> The longer answer is we now have three ID-like things, in order of
>> increasing specificity:
>>
>> Package IDs: containers-0.9
>>      These are the "user visible" things that we expect users to talk
>>      about in Cabal file
>> Package Keys: md5("containers-0.9" + transitive deps)
>>      These are the identifiers the compiler cares about: they are used
>>      for type equality, and contain a bit more detail than we expect
>>      a user to normally need---however, a user might need to refer to
>>      this to disambiguate in some situations.
>> Installed Package IDs: ABI hash of compiled code
>>      This uniquely identifies an installed package in the database, up
>>      to ABI.
>>
>> So, if two packages have the same IPID, their package keys are
>> guaranteed to be the same, but not vice versa. (And likewise for package
>> IDs.)

(Replying to Edward)

It's not clear to me why identical IPID would imply identical package 
key.  Can't two instances of a package compiled against different 
dependencies still have identical ABIs?

Reviewing your patches is next on my queue...

Cheers,
Simon