'hoogle generate' wants me to run 'hoogle generate' first

ExpHP commented 7 years ago

I am running into a curious issue, where hoogle generate appears to be demanding the impossible!

$ hoogle generate
Error, database does not exist (run 'hoogle generate' first)
    Filename: /home/lampam/.hoogle/default-haskell-5.0.9.hoo

Acknowledged, the potential for PEBKAC here is high, as I find it hard to believe I'm the first to report this if this were a real issue affecting multiple users.

Things I tried

~/.hoogle

This directory does not exist, but creating it makes no difference.

rtfm || google fu

Nothing sticks out in particular from hoogle --help. (hoogle generate --help has the same output)
This page doesn't exist.
there's no hoogle data subcommand as some sites mention (guess that's hoogle 4)
Can't find many explicit examples of the command, but the usage in this tweet (March 2016) suggests that no extra arguments are (or were) necessary.

Reinstalling all cabal packages

Since I got hoogle through cabal, I tried reinstalling all cabal packages. Due to PEBKAC potential, I am including the exact steps I performed (in particular, I installed other packages alongside hoogle):

Details on purge and reinstall

``` $ rm -rf ~/.ghc $ cabal update $ # NOTE: cabal is aliased to "cabal: --require-sandbox" $ cabal --no-require-sandbox install alex idris hoogle pointful threadscope hlint (~90 minutes later, it finishes with errors installing idris) $ cabal --no-require-sandbox install hoogle Resolving dependencies... All the requested packages are already installed: hoogle-5.0.9 Use --reinstall if you want to reinstall anyway. $ ls -l `which hoogle` (timestamp was about 20 minutes old; clearly created during the reinstall) $ hoogle generate Error, database does not exist (run 'hoogle generate' first) Filename: /home/lampam/.hoogle/default-haskell-5.0.9.hoo ```

I may try again later with a more thorough purge and a more minimal reinstall.

Versions

(these versions are after the reinstall mentioned above)

$ readlink -f $(which ghc) && ghc --version
/opt/ghc/8.0.2/bin/ghc-8.0.2
# NOTE: the above comes from https://launchpad.net/~hvr/+archive/ubuntu/ghc
The Glorious Glasgow Haskell Compilation System, version 8.0.2

$ readlink -f $(which cabal) && cabal --version
/home/lampam/.cabal/bin/cabal
cabal-install version 1.24.0.1
compiled using version 1.24.1.0 of the Cabal library 

$ readlink -f $(which hoogle) && hoogle --version
/home/lampam/.cabal/bin/hoogle
Hoogle 5.0.9, http://hoogle.haskell.org/

ndmitchell commented 7 years ago

Do you have a shell alias for hoogle, which is doing something like hoogle --color when expanded? If you type hoogle generate ... then it gets treated as a command to generate - but if you do hoogle --flag generate then it expands implicitly to hoogle search --flag generate, and does a search for generate.

ExpHP commented 7 years ago

You are spot on! I set one and completely forgot about it:

$ type hoogle
hoogle is aliased to `hoogle --color --count=10'
$ \hoogle generate
Starting generate
Downloading https://www.stackage.org/lts/cabal.config... 0.85s
[...]

So I take it this behavior is working as designed? Sorry then for the issue that basically amounted to tech support (but also, thanks for the help!)

ndmitchell commented 7 years ago

No problem - it actually seems to be something a lot of people have done - you are far from the first.

ndmitchell / hoogle