ghc-pkg library

On Twitter, Anthony Cowley was wondering why there was no GHC API functions for taking Cabal InstalledPackageInfos and turning them into GHC InstalledPackageInfos. https://twitter.com/a_cowley/status/680158885953564672

No such interface exists: to keep GHC decoupled from Cabal, the GHC package representation is mediated solely by ghc-pkg, so the "correct" way to create a package config file, run ghc-pkg to load it into the GHC binary representation, and go from there.

It seems like it would be convenient if ghc-pkg was libified, and so people who linked against GHC and Cabal could just directly do the conversion without going through ghc-pkg. It's unclear what the right interface is; ghc-pkg does a number of sanity checks and it's unclear if those should be libified too. Any such library also must be uploaded to Hackage, because if you want to link against a newer version of Cabal you have to rebuild the ghc-pkg library against the newest version of Cabal.

Trac metadata

Trac field	Value
Version	7.11
Type	FeatureRequest
TypeOfFailure	OtherFailure
Priority	normal
Resolution	Unresolved
Component	Package system
Test case
Differential revisions
BlockedBy
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Blocking
CC	acowley
Operating system
Architecture