Dependencies in user repository

Duncan Coutts duncan.coutts at worc.ox.ac.uk
Tue Dec 2 18:54:01 EST 2008


On Mon, 2008-12-01 at 21:40 +0000, Lars Kotthoff wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
>  I'm having trouble getting Cabal to find packages installed in my user
> repository.
> 
> When I run ghc-pkg list manually, I can see all the required packages, listed in
> the section for my user repository. When I run ghci I can import said packages
> as well. Yet when I run ghc on the Setup.hs file of a package which requires
> said packages, it tells me that the dependencies are missing.
> 
> It works when I use --package-db to explicitely point it to the user
> package.conf. Am I missing an extra flag or something like that to make it take
> the packages in the user repository into account? I'm using Cabal version
> 1.6.0.1.

It should just work with the --user option, so we'll need more details.
What ghc version are you using exactly?

If it's ghc-6.8.x, is the file for the user package db reported by
ghc-pkg list correct? What is the output of ghc-pkg list?

Mind you, if it was getting the wrong location then I'd expect reading
it to fail, if the file did not exist.

For ghc-6.8.x Cabal calls ghc-pkg list and parses the output to find the
location of the package db files. Then it loads those files directly.

For ghc-6.10.x Cabal calls ghc-pkg dump with --global and/or --user and
parses the output.

Duncan



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