[Haskell-cafe] Distributing Haskell binaries as OSX App Bundles

[Manuel M T Chakravarty]

> I wrote a command-line program recently for a friend in haskell.   
> However, he's far away and not particularly computer literate.  I  
> sent him the raw binaries, but they came up with errors about not  
> being able to find libgmp stuff.  So then I thought I should  
> probably be able to somehow distribute all the stuff together in  
> a .app bundle.  However, the only experience I have of doing this  
> sort of stuff before is via xcode.  What's the best way to go about  
> this?  It just occurred to me now that maybe cmake is the way to go?

If you use the installer package version of GHC

   http://haskell.org/ghc/dist/6.8.3/chakravarty/GHC-6.8.3-i386.pkg

GMP will automatically be linked statically.  As far as creating app  
bundles, one way is to use xcode to to create the bundle structure and  
then have it call a conventional makefile based build system to do the  
actual build and install the binaries into the bundle structure.   
That's what I did to create the GHC.pkg.  It might require some  
fiddling, though.

Manuel