[Haskell-cafe] Cabal and autogenerated files

[John Millikin]

I've had some luck with two techniques for this:

1. Create "stub" files, associated with a custom preprocessor which
knows how to parse them and generate a Haskell module. For example,
you might have "Foo.wx-stub" contain:

    [headers]
    wx/foo.h
    wx/otherheader.h

and then parse it into parameters for wxdirect. That allows Cabal to
generate the appropriate files automatically.

Downside: I've not figured out how to get proper dependency resolution
for this, so occasionally a clean and rebuild is required.

2. Use a Makefile to generate the files, placing them in a
subdirectory added to Cabal's search path. This works well for pretty
much anything, since Make is a bit more mature than Cabal's build
system, but having to remember the pre-processing step is annoying.

On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 09:54, Jeremy O'Donoghue
<jeremy.odonoghue at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Another, probably simple, question regarding cabalization.
>
> Part of wxcore, the low level abstraction in wxHaskell, consists of
> haskell modules which are generated automatically by parsing C headers
> using another tool, wxdirect.
>
> When trying to create an sdist package, we run into the problem that
> because we export modules which are automatically generated, after a
> 'clean', they do not exist, so the sdist package generation fails.
>
> We have tried using 'extra-tmp-files' to list the modules which are
> autogenerated, but this isn't working.
>
> Is this because we are generating the autogen modules in an autogen
> directory, or is this approach likely to fail wherever we put the
> autogenerated files? Our use case seems a reasonable one, as it could
> reasonably exist for any project which relies on automatically
> generated code.
>
> Thanks for any suggestions.
> Jeremy
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