[Haskell-cafe] ANN: ecu-0.0.0

[Tom Hawkins]

This package is a collection of programs that we use at Eaton to
interact with, debug, and analyze data from vehicle ECUs (Electronic
Control Unit: automotive speak for an embedded computer).  The
motivation to put this stuff on hackage is to encourage the use of
Haskell in automotive electronics and to help standardize open data
formats and protocols -- the most common formats and protocols in this
industry are proprietary.  (The other motivation for hackage is it
makes it easy for us to distribute tool updates to our engineers and
technicians in the field.  :-) )

Most of these programs in this package read or write data on a CAN
bus.  At work we use Kvaser CAN cables, so these tools link in
Kvaser's open source CAN driver library, canlib.  However, we
anticipate adding several tools that have nothing to do with CAN --
they could be general data analysis programs that could be applicable
to other fields, not just automotive.  My question is, is it possible
for a user to select which programs to install within a given package?
 I could see where someone would want to install a data analysis tool,
but not want to bother with separately installing Kvaser canlib.  I
had considered different packages for the individual tools, but that
would get messy pretty quick, especially since many tools share a lot
of common code.

Another question: Can we get a Hackage category specifically for the
use of Haskell in embedded systems?  I didn't see anything that stood
out.

And one last question:  The Kvaser canlib library has a different name
depending on if the machine is Linux or Windows.  What is the best way
to configure the build based on the platform?  Current I have the
library name hard coded in the extra-libraries field in the cabal
file.

-Tom

http://hackage.haskell.org/package/ecu
http://github.com/tomahawkins/ecu