Isaac Jones wrote:

Heya Simon.

I've noticed that in ghc 6.4.2, ghc-pkg doesn't create the file (or maybe just the directory) when trying to register a package:

rm -r ~/.ghc/i386-linux-6.4.2 /usr/bin/ghc-pkg update .installed-pkg-config --user ghc-pkg.bin: /home/ijones/.ghc/i386-linux-6.4.2/package.conf: getPermissions: does not exist (No such file or directory)

Cabal could try to create the file & directory w/ something like what you have in ghc-pkg plus createDirectoryIfMissing, but I'm a bit nervous of using the System.Info stuff since I know it's pretty new. I'd like to keep cabal working w/ ghc 6.2. We can probably solve this by creating a ghc 6.3 version of Distribution.GHCPackageConfig.maybeCreateLocalPackageConfig and calling it around line 149 of Distribution.Simple.Register.

Here's how ghc-pkg generates the filename:

appdir <- getAppUserDataDirectory "ghc"

let subdir = targetARCH ++ '-':targetOS ++ '-':version archdir = appdir `joinFileName` subdir user_conf = archdir `joinFileName` "package.conf" user_exists <- doesFileExist user_conf

I'm not sure where the bug is in ghc-pkg; it's not obvious to me, but it'll probably be obvious to you. Should we implement a cabal workaround? Has anyone complained about this?

This is strange. If you look a bit further down in ghc-pkg's Main.hs, there's this: when (not user_exists && user_conf `elem` final_stack) $ do putStrLn ("Creating user package database in " ++ user_conf) createDirectoryIfMissing True archdir writeFile user_conf emptyPackageConfig So it is supposed to create the user package database if it doesn't exist, directories and all. Something has gone wrong here, I'm not sure what. Maybe try strace to see what ghc-pkg is doing? Cheers, Simon