The problem is that the package db contains only what ghc needs to be able to use the library; not the additional information needed to safely remove it. (There are other package systems with this problem, notably Apple's. Apple decided that instead of solving it, they would only support applications that are complete bundles in and of themselves.) And arguably it doesn't actually belong in ghc-pkg insofar as it's not intended to do anything but store the information needed for ghc to link against packages.

This is something of a nasty problem, considering that storing uninstall information separately is not particularly robust. Perhaps ghc-pkg should, if it doesn't already, support extension fields that e.g. cabal can use to store uninstall information. (But even that potentially has problems, given that people are known to copy package registration information between package databases. If there is uninstall information in there, what happens if someone uninstalls via one or the other copy?)

On Sun, Nov 12, 2017 at 10:53 PM, Evan Laforge <qdunkan@gmail.com> wrote:
For a very long time, I've used a local script to uninstall libraries.
Initially it was very simple: use ghc-pkg field to find and remove
library-dirs, import-dirs, and haddock-html, and call ghc-pkg
unregister.

It served well for a long time, but eventually I got tired of copy
paste games and extended it to be able to recursively delete
dependents too.  Unfortunately now it's no longer so simple.  The main
problem is that the only way I know to find dependents is to ghc-pkg
unregister, and see what the error message complains about.  That's
obviously pretty bad, since by that time you've already unregistered,
so it's too late to back out.  The non-atomic nature of unregister+rm
has always caused problems anyway, since if unregister succeeds, but
the remove fails, we are stuck with a partial install.  Recursive
delete is too error prone, so I reverted that.

And then I discovered that hmatrix helpfully includes /opt/local/lib
and /usr/local/lib in its library-dirs, so clearly just deleting
whatever the package tells me is not very safe.  All this has led me
to believe uninstalling packages is not so simple, and maybe there
should be an actual real way to do it, not everyone hacking up their
own dangerous shell scripts.

So... is there?  Should there be one?  Is there interest in one?  How
do other people uninstall libraries?  Is there a better interface to
the pkg db than ghc-pkg?  Is there a better way to find dependents
than ghc-pkg unregister?
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