[Haskell-cafe] Retrospective on 2008?

[Duncan Coutts]

On Thu, 2008-12-11 at 13:13 +0000, Dougal Stanton wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 1:00 PM, Henk-Jan van Tuyl <hjgtuyl at chello.nl> wrote:
> >
> > Using the commands:
> >  cabal update
> >  cabal list | fgrep " * " | wc
> > I counted 927 entries.
> >
> 
> Unfortunately that's not a reliable means of determining cabal
> packages. (Baffling, I know.) I think it actually lists things you
> have installed from other sources, too. For instance:
> 
> 
> $ cabal list | grep cairo
>  * cairo
>       Homepage: http://haskell.org/gtk2hs/archives/2006/01/26/cairo-eye-candy/
> $ cabal install cairo
> cabal: There is no package named cairo

Good point. I'd forgotten that. That'd explain why the hackage stats do
not agree with me.

> Last time this came up there was mention of adding an option to only
> list things which cabal has control over. I don't know if anything has
> come of that idea.

I expect it'd be easy for some new cabal hacker. I await the patch :-)

Duncan