-hide-package doesn't allow hiding uninstalled package

[MagnusTherning]

The following behaviour seems a bit too strict:

% ghc-pkg list dataenc
/usr/lib/ghc-6.8.2/package.conf:
% ghc --make -hide-package dataenc -isrc UT.hs
ghc-6.8.2 : unknown package: dataenc

[ajd]

I wrote a patch to "fix" this but I'm not sure it ought to be the correct behavior. According to the comments around the function in question, -ignore-package already has this behavior because it's supposed to be used as a just-in-case thing, they way you are trying to use -hide-package. Anyway, I'm attaching the patch and I'll leave it up to the powers that be to decide what to do about it.

[ajd]

Patch to GHC so that -hide-package does not raise an error if the package in question does not exist

[MagnusTherning]

Replying to ajd:

I wrote a patch to "fix" this but I'm not sure it ought to be the correct behavior. According to the comments around the function in question, -ignore-package already has this behavior because it's supposed to be used as a just-in-case thing, they way you are trying to use -hide-package. Anyway, I'm attaching the patch and I'll leave it up to the powers that be to decide what to do about it.

Well, I find that I have to hide packages regularly since it allows me to have a module installed while I'm hacking on the next version of it. Without it my unit/quickcheck tests link to the installed version one by default.

One option would be to keep the current behaviour as default, but allow overriding it e.g. by using '--force' (similar to how 'rm' has '-f').

[igloo]

This just needs us to decide what the best behaviour is. I think we should at least warn if the package isn't installed, to catch people making typos.

[igloo]

It looks like -ignore-package dataenc already does what you want, so I'm closing this ticket.