Custom data in InstalledPackageInfo?

[Matthias Kilian]

Hi,

I'm currently hacking a little bit on ghc (and Cabal) to add some
custom data stored in ghc's package database. For now this will be
just another field `distPackageId' (probably a stupid name), and
I'll use this only for the OpenBSD port of GHC. The rationale is
that OpenBSD ports developers really want to see to which (OpenBSD)
package a (GHC) package belongs. For example, for a (GHC) library
like cairo we have a (OpenBSD) package called `hs-cairo' and located
under `graphics/hs-cairo' in our ports tree. So with this additional
data stored in the package database, one could run `ghc-pkg list
-v' to get the installed libraries, their signatures *and* the
location within our ports tree.

Before I'm wasting too much time on this: is there already any
mechanism to achieve this? Or do people think a more general approach
would be better?

Or doesn't this make any sense at all?

The additional info would be done during package registration, btw.

I think this may help other os distributions as well (or rather the
package maintainers of the distributions).

Ciao,
	Kili