[Haskell-cafe] Distributing a program with support files

[Duncan Coutts]

On Sun, 2007-05-27 at 14:36 +0100, Neil Mitchell wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm wanting to release a Haskell program, but am confused how I should
> distribute the associated files it needs. On Windows I would use the
> functions to find the path of the executable, and find the support
> files relative to that - in Haskell (because of Linux) that isn't the
> case.
> 
> The basic setup I have is:
> 
> foo.exe - main binary
> library.hs - required by the binary
> examples\*.hs - a massive tree of examples, which can be used by the binary
> 
> foo.exe also needs to create temporary files relative to library.hs
> and the examples.

list the support files in the "data-files:" stanza in the .cabal file.
Then import the Paths_<pkg> module that Cabal generates for you. It
exports a few functions including:

  getDataDir :: IO FilePath

So if you listed:

data-files: library.hs, examples\foo.hs, ...

then you'd say

dataDir <- getDataDir
doSomething (dataDir </> "library" <.> "hs" )
doSomething (dataDir </> "examples" </> "foo" <.> "hs" )

This should be portable between linux and windows (and everything else
for that matter).

Duncan