[Haskell-beginners] Distributing executables

[Magnus Therning]

On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 9:53 AM, Alp Mestan <alp at mestan.fr> wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 10:15 AM, Magnus Therning <magnus at therning.org>
> wrote:
>>
>> It could be a good extension to Cabal (not the tool), currently
>> there's the target 'sdist', maybe add a target 'wininst'.  Similar to
>> how Python's distutils have targets for MSI and Windows installers.
>
> Actually, I was more thinking about a separate tool. Something you'd just
> install, from cabal/apt/pacman/whatever, using some external system tools to
> check out dependencies of the application, then packaging everything and
> putting some install.sh script around for linux, and a nice installer under
> Windows, etc. It is just an idea, but the main point here is that it'd just
> be "simple". (of course, the idea I describe may fail heavily for packaging
> very complex and heavy apps, IMO, but I think there are workarounds)

Linux ought to be simple, a script based on output from ldd would most
likely do it.  Or even better, run prelink on the executable (I
suspect it'd work, but I'm not sure).  Though for Linux I don't
understand why anyone would do this, since it's so simple to put
together distro packages :-)

IMNSHO Windows is the only OS where it's useful to create binary
installers.  There are quite a few tools out there for that, I'd
expect most of them would be suitable for Haskell binaries.

/M

-- 
Magnus Therning                        (OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4)
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