therning.org/ magnus

A few days ago I noticed that there were a few Haskell packages on AUR that had received updates. This was the excuse I had been waiting for to address the second part of keeping my Haskell packages up-to-date (I’ve written about the first part before, dealing with an update to GHC).

It’s easy to find the packages with available updates:

% yaourt -Su --aur

Unfortunately it isn’t as easy as just updating the listed packages. Any package that depends on an updated package really should be re-compiled and re-installed to guarantee that the entire system behaves as expected after the upgrade. Of course pacman can handle it:

% pacman -Rcn <all pkgs with updates>

This will list all packages that will be removed. After removing them all, they can all be re-installed. That is of course not quite as nice as it could be, since they all then will be explicitly installed, it would be nicer to just re-install the “top-level packages”. This is one way to achieve this.

I did a bit of refactoring and put the Arch-related functions from the previous post in their own module, Arch. Then I added a function that takes a package and recursively inspects Required By until a “top-level package” (i.e. a package that doesn’t require any other package) is reached:

getTopRequiredBy pkg = let
        tops = do
            first <- getRequiredBy pkg
            if null first
                then return [pkg]
                else liftM concat $ mapM getTopRequiredBy first
    in liftM nub tops

After that it’s straight forward to write up a little tool which offers some advice on what to do:

main = do
    pkgsToUpgrade <- getArgs
    pkgsToReinstall <- liftM (nub . concat) $ mapM Arch.getTopRequiredBy pkgsToUpgrade
    putStrLn $ "To remove     : pacman -Rnc " ++ unwords pkgsToUpgrade
    putStrLn $ "To re-install : yaourt -S " ++ unwords pkgsToReinstall

Using it on the packages I wanted to upgrade gave the following output:

% runhaskell PkgUpgrade.hs haskell-{configfile,haxml,json,missingh,safe,testpack,time}
To remove     : pacman -Rnc haskell-configfile haskell-haxml haskell-json haskell-missingh haskell-safe haskell-testpack haskell-time
To re-install : yaourt -S haskell-configfile haskell-haxml haskell-json haskell-hsh haskell-safe

Following that advice seemed to work just like I intended.

The previous post was a fairly silly example, unless of course it’s more useful than I realise However, here’s something that I can see a bit more use of, a monad that restricts reading and writing of files to two files, one to read from and one to write to.

Again, the first step is to create a data type:

newtype TwoFileIO a = TwoFileIO { execTwoFileIO :: (Handle, Handle) -> IO a }

This defines a type wrapping a function that takes a pair of handles (one for input and one for output) and returns an “IO action”. Turning this into a monad is straight forward (actually it’s similar to the Reader monad):

instance Monad TwoFileIO where
    return v = TwoFileIO $ \ _ -> return v
    (>>=) m f = let
            fInIO = execTwoFileIO . f
        in TwoFileIO $ \ hs ->
            execTwoFileIO m hs >>= \v -> fInIO v hs

To return a value we can simply drop the pair of handles and return the value in IO. Bind (>>=) only looks complicated, what happens is that the first argument is “executed” with the provided handles, then the second argument is passed the result and executed with the same pair of handles. Of course the handles aren’t actually known yet, so an anynmous function is created, and wrapped in an instance of TwoFileIO. That’s it for the most complicated part.

In order to avoid having to manually open files and wire everything up I wrote the following convenience function:

runFileIO m iFn oFn = do
    iH <- openFile iFn ReadMode
    oH <- openFile oFn WriteMode
    res <- execTwoFileIO m (iH, oH)
    mapM_ hClose [iH, oH]
    return res

Yes, it does lack a bit in exception handling, but it’s good enough for now.

Then I can define the actions/functions that are available inside TwoFileIO. Reading and writing lines:

fioPutStrLn s = TwoFileIO $ \ (iH, oH) ->
    hPutStrLn oH s
 
fioGetLine = TwoFileIO $ \ (iH, oH) ->
    hGetLine iH

Note how it now becomes very hard to mix up the files and accidentally read from the output file or write to the input file.

As a little test function I used this one, which reads two lines and then writes them in the reversed order:

get1stN2ndPutLast = do
    first <- fioGetLine
    second <- fioGetLine
    fioPutStrLn second
    fioPutStrLn first

I can now test this using ghci:

> h <- openFile "testIn.txt" ReadMode
> hGetContents h
"line 0\nline 1\nline 2\n"
> runFileIO get1stN2ndPutLast "testIn.txt" "testOut.txt"
> h <- openFile "testOut.txt" ReadMode
> hGetContents h
"line 1\nline 0\n"

I’ve many times heard that Haskell can be used to prevent certain kind of programmer mistakes. In a presentation on Darcs it was explained how GADTs (especially phantom types) are used in Darcs to make sure that operations on patches follow certain rules. Another way, and at least it sounds easier, is to limit the available functions by running code in some sort of container. This being Haskell, that container is often a monad. I’ve really never seen this presentedⁱ, so I thought I’d try to do it, and indeed it turns out to be very simple.

I started with a data type:

newtype HideIO a = HideIO { runHideIO :: IO a }

which I then made into a Monad in order to make it easy to work with:

instance Monad HideIO where
    return = HideIO . return
 
    (>>=) m f = HideIO $ runHideIO m >>= runHideIO . f

Then I can create an IO function that are allowed in the HideIO monad:

hioPutStrLn = HideIO . putStrLn

In ghci I can then do the following:

> runHideIO $ hioPutStrLn "Hello, World!"
Hello, World!

But I can’t do much else.

1. Most probably due do my weak searching-fu than anything else.[back]