ghc-pkg -f new.package.conf register foo.conf fails if new.package.conf does not exist.

[JeremyShaw]

In GHC 6.1.0.2, ghc-pkg -f new.package.conf register foo.conf, fails if new.package.conf does not exist. In GHC 6.10.1 this worked fine. Not sure if this change is a bug or feature.

[igloo]

Thanks for the report. In this case it's a feature; from the release notes:

ghc-pkg will now complain if told to use a package.conf that doesn't exist.

[duncan]

Replying to igloo:

Thanks for the report. In this case it's a feature;

Although the point of the feature was to fail when trying to read from a non-existent package db. I don't think we considered the case of writing to a non-existent db. (Though I thought that did not work previously anyway, I thought dbs had to be initialised to contain "[]".)

[simonmar]

Just echo "[]" >new.package.conf to initialise new.package.conf.