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GHC 9.10.3 · lts/ghc-9.10.x · c74966e · 2026-09-27

ModuleCabal-syntax-3.12.1.0Haskell2010

Distribution.InstalledPackageInfo

This is the information about an installed package that is communicated to the ghc-pkg program in order to register a package. ghc-pkg now consumes this package format (as of version 6.4). This is specific to GHC at the moment.

The .cabal file format is for describing a package that is not yet installed. It has a lot of flexibility, like conditionals and dependency ranges. As such, that format is not at all suitable for describing a package that has already been built and installed. By the time we get to that stage, we have resolved all conditionals and resolved dependency version constraints to exact versions of dependent packages. So, this module defines the InstalledPackageInfo data structure that contains all the info we keep about an installed package. There is a parser and pretty printer. The textual format is rather simpler than the .cabal format: there are no sections, for example.

  • 3 types
  • 10 values
datadata InstalledPackageInfo
#
Instances14Eq, Read, Show, Generic, NFData, Binary, …

Get the indefinite unit identity representing this package. This IS NOT guaranteed to give you a substitution; for instantiated packages you will get DefiniteUnitId (installedUnitId ipi). For indefinite libraries, however, you will correctly get an OpenUnitId with the appropriate OpenModuleSubst.

datadata ExposedModule
#
Instances11Eq, Read, Show, Generic, NFData, Binary, …
datadata AbiDependency
#

An ABI dependency is a dependency on a library which also records the ABI hash (abiHash) of the library it depends on.

The primary utility of this is to enable an extra sanity when GHC loads libraries: it can check if the dependency has a matching ABI and if not, refuse to load this library. This information is critical if we are shadowing libraries; differences in the ABI hash let us know what packages get shadowed by the new version of a package.

Instances10Eq, Read, Show, Generic, NFData, Binary, …