#13753: Improve GHC's ghc package environment lookup logic -------------------------------------+------------------------------------- Reporter: hvr | Owner: (none) Type: feature | Status: new request | Priority: normal | Milestone: 8.2.2 Component: Compiler | Version: 8.0.1 Keywords: | Operating System: Unknown/Multiple Architecture: | Type of failure: None/Unknown Unknown/Multiple | Test Case: | Blocked By: Blocking: | Related Tickets: Differential Rev(s): | Wiki Page: -------------------------------------+------------------------------------- Documentation for package enviroments which describes the current lookup logic: https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/latest/docs/html/users_guide/packages.htm... #package-environments There's two things I'd like to improve: 1. Define a special magic "null" environment, which instructs GHC to ignore any package environment files. To this end, I propose to use the name `-` (i.e. a single dash), as that is more portable than using the empty string for environment variables. In other words: * `-package-env -` or * `GHC_ENVIRONMENT=-` (unless a `-package-env` flag which has higher priority overrides it) would prevent GHC from interpreting any package environment files. 2. Provide a way to disambiguate environment names (i.e. those that are looked up in `$HOME/.ghc/arch-os-version/environments/name`) and environment files arguments. Currently, if you say `GHC_ENVIRONMENT=test` then a local file `test` would shadow the environment named `test` which would result in rather confusing errors. Instead I suggest to have package-env identifiers be interpreted as "names" by default, and only if they look like relative or absolute paths (i.e. `./foobar` or `/home/foo/...`) be interpreted as file locations (relative to $CWD). -- Ticket URL: http://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/13753 GHC http://www.haskell.org/ghc/ The Glasgow Haskell Compiler