This package was written to assist you at finding a set of packages, which satisfy your needs. At the moment it doesn't have a standalone executable, but you can do the queries from your Haskell code. It uses Data.Generics.PlateData, so * when Cabal package format changes, we don't have to rewrite anything * all queries are statically typed * as a disadvantage, we may suffer some performance loss when doing very complex queries, anyway most of processing goes while we read package descriptions, not querying them Example of enduser querying code:

module Main where

import qualified Data.ByteString.Lazy as B import System.Environment import Distribution.Query import Distribution.Compiler import Distribution.License import Distribution.ModuleName hiding (main) import Distribution.Package import Distribution.PackageDescription import Distribution.Version import Distribution.Text import Language.Haskell.Extension

main = (head `fmap` getArgs) >>= B.readFile >>= mapM_ (putStrLn . show . (x -> (display $ package x, display $ license x))) . queryIndex (Not (Id (== GPL)) :& Not (Id (== BSD3)))

This queries an index file, which is commonly located at ~/.cabal/packages/hackage.haskell.org/00-index.tar in POSIX systems. You can query any field of PackageDescription no matter how deep it is. You don't need to provide any type signature for comparison functions, which are wrapped in Id, as long as you use data constructors for which type can be inferred. In the future versions I want to add some query expressions parser, for invoking cabal-query from command-line. I suppose this will look like: cabal-query -q 'license == BSD3 & stability == stable & testedWith == GHC & repoType == (git | darcs)'