On 2011 May 25, at 05:53, Mark Wright wrote:

On Wed, 25 May 2011 02:20:39 +0200, Jacek Generowicz

...

wrote: I have recenly installed lambdabot. Its response to *each* *and* *every* hoogle command is *always*

A Hoogle error occurred.

I'm hoping that someone on Cafe might be able to offer a more helpful diagnosis than this ... erm ... terse ... error message.

Hi Jacek,

Hi Mark,

The lambdabot hoogle command requires hoogle to be installed locally, and to work.

Ah. Thank you. I had assumed that it connected to a server. (Maybe my assumption was not entirely unfounded, given that the installation instructions for lambdabot blithely state that you "just cabal install lambdabot", nowhere suggesting that you might need to *manually* install some of its dependencies.)

Hence the first thing to ty is to run the hoogle command line version, something like:

hoogle '[a] -> a'

If that doesn't work, maybe try building some hoogle databases.

First I needed to 'cabal install hoogle'. Having done that, I needed to do what you suggested:

hoogle data

Which works swimmingly on Ubuntu, but fails on OS X, because wget seems to be hard-wired. I seem to recall that at least one of the packages that I installed over the last 2 days, automatically selected wget on Ubuntu, and curl on OS X. Any pointers to the least painful way of getting 'hoogle data' to work on OS X? Once I have the hoogle command line version working, it seems that lambdabot truncates its output to just the first 3 lines. Is this normal? Is there a way of customizing or changing this behaviour?

On 2011 May 25, at 13:10, Mark Wright wrote:

I assume your test on OS X was with the latest hoogle version so that old issues would no longer be relevant:

I would be surprised if it weren't the latest, as I started installing everything from scratch a couple of days ago. Anyway, my hoogle version is 4.2.3, which is the most recent, AFAICT (ie, it's the highest version number on hackage) but I have tripped over so many things on this trip, that I wouldn't be surprised by anything any more.

...

Once I have the hoogle command line version working, it seems that lambdabot truncates its output to just the first 3 lines. Is this normal?

Yes.

...

Is there a way of customizing or changing this behaviour?

No (other than patching lambdabot), so the obvious workaround is to run the hoogle from the command line.

Understood. Thank you.

On 2011 May 25, at 16:41, Gwern Branwen wrote:

On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 6:22 AM, Jacek Generowicz wrote:

...

I had assumed that it connected to a server.

It did at one point, but Hoogle had downtime and the local hoogle command was just as good and worked offline.

Makes sense.

...

(Maybe my assumption was not entirely unfounded, given that the installation instructions for lambdabot blithely state that you "just cabal install lambdabot", nowhere suggesting that you might need to *manually* install some of its dependencies.)

Well, does every lambdabot user want mueval and hoogle installed?

Quite possibly not, but it would it be too much to ask, to have the documentation mention that they need to be installed separately if you intend to use them through lambdabot? I've already stumbled across mueval and hoogle as things that need to be installed separately before the full advertized features of lambdabot work. With this experience under my belt and the benefit of hindsight, I vaguely, almost, kinda, maybe see how I could have guessed that the stubborn response "A Hoogle error occurred." to any hoogle command in lambdabot, means that I need to install hoogle locally: 'hoogle ...' --> "A Hoogle error occurred." ==> install hoogle. But how on earth was I supposed to guess that in order to make 'check' work, the package to install was 'mueval', given that the error message was "Terminated"? 'check ...' --> "Terminated" ==> install mueval. Hmmm. What other lambdabot features rely on packages that need to be installed separately?

...

Once I have the hoogle command line version working, it seems that lambdabot truncates its output to just the first 3 lines. Is this normal? Is there a way of customizing or changing this behaviour?

It's normal, yeah. Don't want to spam #haskell with 100 lines of useless matches.

Agreed. I guessed that this would be the motivation.

Configurable? Not really.

OK. Thank you.

On 2011 May 25, at 17:42, Gwern Branwen wrote:

On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 11:08 AM, Jacek Generowicz wrote:

...

I've already stumbled across mueval and hoogle as things that need to be installed separately before the full advertized features of lambdabot work.

With this experience under my belt and the benefit of hindsight, I vaguely, almost, kinda, maybe see how I could have guessed that the stubborn response "A Hoogle error occurred." to any hoogle command in lambdabot, means that I need to install hoogle locally:

'hoogle ...' --> "A Hoogle error occurred." ==> install hoogle.

But how on earth was I supposed to guess that in order to make 'check' work, the package to install was 'mueval', given that the error message was "Terminated"?

'check ...' --> "Terminated" ==> install mueval.

You weren't really meant to - lambdabot isn't exactly meant for anyone who won't look at the source when something goes wrong.

Understood. Fair enough. I feel a bit guilty about spamming the list with all my stupid problems: I would prefer to find my own way around, but if I had to dive in and rummage around the source for every problem that I encounter, I would not get very far.

...

What other lambdabot features rely on packages that need to be installed separately?

Brainfuck and unlambda are separate executables, but they already have deps.

I must admit that hoogle and check were far stronger incentives to try to intstall lambdabot, than brainfuck and unlambda :-)

On 2011 May 25, at 23:20, Brandon Moore wrote:

...

From: Jacek Generowicz Sent: May 25, 2011 2:45 PM

I feel a bit guilty about spamming the list with all my stupid problems: I would prefer to find my own way around, but if I had to dive in and rummage around the source for every problem that I encounter, I would not get very far.

I'm not particularly interested in lambdabot myself, but this seems like a reasonable conversation for this list, and the sort of thing that's nice to have recorded in the mailing list archives - and hopefully folded back into appropriate package descriptions and wiki pages.

I'm hoping to find some time at the end of this journey to gather together what I have learned on the way, and to try to feed some of the information back into relevant places. (Any pointers on how to do this most productively would be welcome.) But my fear is that by the time I am done, I will have used up all my Haskell time for this quarter.

I wonder a few quick greps for error messages in the source code might have turned up something useful without too much trouble,

I wonder myself too. From my point of complete ignorance about how the packages are put together, and almost complete ignorance about cabal, it's difficult to judge when (and for how long) it's worth digging in with grep etc.: sometimes it will be a fruitful exercise, and sometimes not. Sometimes someone else will understand my problem faster than I can type "grep", and sometimes not. So my tactic is to dig a little, then send out a cry for help, before digging further.

but from skimming messages it seems your efforts have been at least as much as can reasonably be expected for installing a cabal package without big giant disclaimers.

Thank you for your kind words. I hope that most others find my spam as inoffensive as you do.

Hi Jacek,

Which works swimmingly on Ubuntu, but fails on OS X, because wget seems to be hard-wired. I seem to recall that at least one of the packages that I installed over the last 2 days, automatically selected wget on Ubuntu, and curl on OS X.

I see someone raised a bug for this: http://code.google.com/p/ndmitchell/issues/detail?id=434 - it's a very reasonable idea, which I'll include in the next version. Then if you have either wget or curl it will work.

Any pointers to the least painful way of getting 'hoogle data' to work on OS X?

Set up a shell alias so wget just calls curl? Install wget on OS X? If neither of these is feasible let me know and I'll rush out a new version of Hoogle. Thanks, Neil