[Haskell-cafe] Distributing Linux binaries

[Lyle Kopnicky]

Thanks folks for your replies.

I did learn, from your e-mails and from the cabal documentation (example 9
on page
http://www.haskell.org/cabal/release/cabal-latest/doc/users-guide/builders.htm),
how to build a tarball with an executable and LICENSE file, via cabal copy.
It would have been nice to include the documentation (user's guide) as well,
but I don't know how to get cabal copy to put that into the bundle.

Unfortunately, I don't feel it's of great use to the end user. Now they have
a tarball with paths like /usr/local/bin/vintbas and
/usr/local/share/doc/vintage-basic-1.0/LICENSE.txt. Untarring it gives a
warning and strips the leading /, so it won't untar in root unless you CD to
root first. And of course you have to have root access to do that. If you
want to install it in your user dir, you'll have to make a substitution for
the paths.

You suggested I write my own install script. But certainly this is a common
situation, and someone has made a generic install script for this sort of
thing?

As I've said I tried to make a Debian package, folowing two different
cabal-to-debian instructions, and neither one worked.

If it is a hurdle for me, I can imagine a lot of people are getting
frustrated at trying to distribute their binaries on Linux.

- Lyle
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