On 21 November 2004 00:56, Isaac Jones wrote:

The systems that would want to do this kind of thing, such as Debian, have other mechanisms for deciding whether packages conflict, etc.

IIRC, this is the argument I just used against adding support for multiple libraries in Cabal, so I guess I agree :-D

Over-all I'm kinda neutral about whether HC-pkg needs to be an opaque interface to the packaging system. What are the advantages to this?

Well, for one thing it allows us flexibility in how we store the package database. In GHC, I'm using the show/read form of [InstalledPackageInfo] to store the database, but it'd be nice if I could use binary serialisation in the future. To support a directory of config files, we don't have to expose the complete format, though. As long as hc-pkg can process the InstalledPackageInfo to produce the native format into a file, then we just ship that file with the distribution. So I'm fine with this, as long as we're not specifying the contents of the *.conf file. Cheers, Simon