Claus Reinke wrote:
registry sounds like overkill to me. If really an absolute hardcoded path is needed, I would appreciate if it is stored only in a single place (for ghc, ghci, ghc-pkg and package.conf).
that was my point: how do you find that 'single place', given the wide variety of versions, platforms, packagers, installation-specific availability, ..?
the only half-way portable solution (without a special case for every platform) i can think of is a program in PATH. we don't always keep all versions of ghc tools in PATH, but we need one single tool "to bind them all"..;-)
as long as that tool can be found in PATH, it can serve as a mediator/abstract interface for finding everything else, independent of platform.
Other tools have a "relocate" script, that only changes that location after unpacking (or move).
think of 'ghc-tools' as the guardian for your 'single place' and of 'ghc-tools relocate' as your relocate script.
I think `ghc-pkg` should play this central role, that must in the PATH and knows the package.conf location. So ghc (or the ghc wrapper) must call ghc-pkg for the package.conf file (ghci could simply call ghc, like runghc does call ghc) Christian