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ghc-pkg(1) General Commands Manual ghc-pkg(1)

ghc-pkg - GHC Haskell Cabal package manager

ghc-pkg action [OPTION]...

A package is a library of Haskell modules known to the compiler. The ghc-pkg tool allows adding or removing them from a package database. By default, the system-wide package database is modified, but alternatively the user's local package database or another specified file can be used.

To make a package available for ghc, ghc-pkg can be used to register it. Unregistering it removes it from the database. Also, packages can be hidden, to make ghc ignore the package by default, without uninstalling it. Exposing a package makes a hidden package available. Additionally, ghc-pkg has various commands to query the package database.

Where a package name is required, the package can be named in full including the version number (e.g. network-1.0), or without the version number. Naming a package without the version number matches all versions of the package; the specified action will be applied to all the matching packages. A package specifier that matches all version of the package can also be written pkg-*, to make it clearer that multiple packages are being matched.

Register the package using the specified installed package description.
Register the package, overwriting any other package with the same name.
Unregister the specified package.
Expose the specified package.
Hide the specified package
List registered packages in the global database, and also the user database if --user is given. If a package name is given all the registered versions will be listed in ascending order. Accepts the --simple-output flag.
Generate a graph of the package dependencies in a form suitable for input for the graphviz tools. For example, to generate a PDF of the dependency graph:
dot tred dot -Tpdf >pkgs.pdf
List registered packages exposing module module in the global database, and also the user database if --user is given. All the registered versions will be listed in ascending order. Accepts the --simple-output flag.
Prints the highest registered version of a package.
Check the consistency of package dependencies and list broken packages. Accepts the --simple-output flag.
Give the registered description for the specified package. The description is returned in precisely the syntax required by ghc-pkg register.
Extract the specified field of the package description for the specified package. Accepts comma-separated multiple fields.
Dump the registered description for every package. This is like ghc-pkg describe '*', expect that it is intended to be used by tools that parse the results, rather than humans.
Regenerate the package database cache. This command should only be necessary if you added a package to the database by dropping a file into the database directory manyally. By default, the global DB is recached; to recache a different DB use --user or --package-conf as appropriate.

When asked to modify a database (register, unregister, update, hide, expose, and also check), ghc-pkg modifies the global database by default. Specifying --user causes it to act on the user database, or --package-conf can be used to act on another database entirely. When multiple of these options are given, the rightmost one is used as the database to act upon.

Commands that query the package database (list, latest, describe, field) operate on the list of databases specified by the flags --user, --global, and --package-conf. If none of these flags are given, the default is --global --user.

Use the current user's package database.
Use the global package database.
Use the specified package config file.
Location of the global package config.
Ignore missing dependencies, directories, and libraries.
Ignore missing directories and libraries only.
Automatically build libs for GHCi (with register).
-?, --help
Display a help message and exit.
Output version information and exit.
Print output in easy-to-parse format for some commands.
Only print package names, not versions; can only be used with list --simple-output.
Ignore case for substring matching.

The GHC_PACKAGE_PATH environment variable may be set to a :-separated list of files containing package databases. This list of package databases is used by ghc and ghc-pkg, with earlier databases in the list overriding later ones. This order was chosen to match the behaviour of the PATH environment variable; think of it as a list of package databases that are searched left-to-right for packages.

If GHC_PACKAGE_PATH ends in a separator, then the default user and system package databases are appended, in that order. e.g. to augment the usual set of packages with a database of your own, you could say:

export GHC_PACKAGE_PATH=$HOME/.my-ghc-packages.conf:

To check whether your GHC_PACKAGE_PATH setting is doing the right thing, ghc-pkg list will list all the databases in use, in the reverse order they are searched.

Both of these locations are changed for Debian. Upstream still keeps these under /usr. Some programs may refer to that, but look in /var instead.

/var/lib/ghc/package.conf
Global package.conf file.
/var/lib/ghc/package.conf.d/
Directory for library specific package.conf files. These are added to the global registry.

ghc(1), runghc(1), hugs(1).

This manual page was written by Kari Pahula <kaol@debian.org>, for the Debian project (and may be used by others).

2010-01-27