[Haskell-cafe] Erroneous package listings in hackage?

[Duncan Coutts]

On Fri, 2008-09-12 at 14:18 +0200, Henk-Jan van Tuyl wrote:
> On Fri, 12 Sep 2008 13:21:59 +0200, Dougal Stanton  

> > $ cabal list | less
> >  ...
> >  * cairo
> >       Latest version installed: 0.9.13
> >       Homepage: http://haskell.org/gtk2hs/
> >       License:  BSD3
> >  ...
> > $ cabal install cairo
> > cabal: There is no package named cairo
> >
> > I must admit I was surprised to see a gtk2hs module on Hackage, but
> > not half as surprised when I found it wasn't there after all...

> There is clearly something wrong here; there is also a package named gtk  
> that is listed with "cabal list" but cannot be downloaded.

There is nothing wrong, but perhaps the output is not very clear. Here's
what it says about packages are are installed *and* available on
hackage:

 * zlib
      Latest version available: 0.4.0.4
      Latest version installed: 0.4.0.4
      Synopsis: Compression and decompression in the gzip and zlib formats
      License:  BSD3

Where as for cairo and gtk you'll notice that it does not list any
available version.

Perhaps for packages that are installed but not re-installable via Cabal
(like cairo, base, ghc etc) it should say something. Do you have any
specific suggestions?

Duncan