On Fri, 2008-09-12 at 14:18 +0200, Henk-Jan van Tuyl wrote:

On Fri, 12 Sep 2008 13:21:59 +0200, Dougal Stanton

...

$ cabal list | less ... * cairo Latest version installed: 0.9.13 Homepage: http://haskell.org/gtk2hs/ License: BSD3 ... $ cabal install cairo cabal: There is no package named cairo

I must admit I was surprised to see a gtk2hs module on Hackage, but not half as surprised when I found it wasn't there after all...

There is clearly something wrong here; there is also a package named gtk that is listed with "cabal list" but cannot be downloaded.

There is nothing wrong, but perhaps the output is not very clear. Here's what it says about packages are are installed *and* available on hackage: * zlib Latest version available: 0.4.0.4 Latest version installed: 0.4.0.4 Synopsis: Compression and decompression in the gzip and zlib formats License: BSD3 Where as for cairo and gtk you'll notice that it does not list any available version. Perhaps for packages that are installed but not re-installable via Cabal (like cairo, base, ghc etc) it should say something. Do you have any specific suggestions? Duncan

On Sat, 2008-09-13 at 12:06 +0100, Dougal Stanton wrote:

On Sat, Sep 13, 2008 at 1:51 AM, Duncan Coutts wrote:

...

Perhaps for packages that are installed but not re-installable via Cabal (like cairo, base, ghc etc) it should say something. Do you have any specific suggestions?

Well that explains it then! I had no idea it listed stuff not available from Hackage. I've been using `cabal list | grep foo` to search for packages but that's obviously not optimal, it seems.

I guess you're searching through the package description too. The reason cabal list currently only searches though the name (though it does do substring matching) is that parsing every .cabal file in the index is rather slow. At some point we'll probably have to make a cache of the info which we generate when the index is downloaded.

I don't know what would clarify the matter. An "available from Hackage: (yes/no)" field? Or a flag to pass to `cabal list` to show Hackage stuff only?

We've got an --installed flag to list only installed stuff, we could add one for the opposite case. You can file a feature request ticket here: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ Or send us a patch! :-) I don't expect it'd be hard to add. Duncan