[Haskell-cafe] Erroneous package listings in hackage?

[Duncan Coutts]

On Sat, 2008-09-13 at 12:06 +0100, Dougal Stanton wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 13, 2008 at 1:51 AM, Duncan Coutts
> <duncan.coutts at worc.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
> > 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?
> 
> Well that explains it then! I had no idea it listed stuff not
> available from Hackage. I've been using `cabal list | grep foo` to
> search for packages but that's obviously not optimal, it seems.

I guess you're searching through the package description too. The reason
cabal list currently only searches though the name (though it does do
substring matching) is that parsing every .cabal file in the index is
rather slow. At some point we'll probably have to make a cache of the
info which we generate when the index is downloaded.

> I don't know what would clarify the matter. An "available from
> Hackage: (yes/no)" field? Or a flag to pass to `cabal list` to show
> Hackage stuff only?

We've got an --installed flag to list only installed stuff, we could add
one for the opposite case. You can file a feature request ticket here:

http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/

Or send us a patch! :-) I don't expect it'd be hard to add.

Duncan