How can I purge my Haskell installation from my Windows XP machine?

Question

I tried uninstalling the Haskell Platform, but the package database remains intact. How can I completely purge Haskell from my system?

Answer 1

Both cabal and ghc maintain some extra data that isn't currently uninstalled by the platform installer, thankfully however they're well behaved and store their data in appropriate application data folders.

Assuming you've only installed user level packages, the easiest way to delete them on the windows platform is to type %APPDATA% in the windows run dialog or windows explorer bar, this should open the root of the application data folder, then delete the ghc and cabal folders.

As an aside, before uninstalling the platform you can use use the command ghc-pkg list --user to see what user level packages are installed, the top of the list will include the path where ghc stores local user files. Obviously leaving out the --user flag will provide system wide information.

If you weren't aware of the ghc-pkg program take a look at ghc-pkg --help as you can often resolve package issues using it.

Hope that helps.