[Haskell-cafe] Custom cabal languages (hooks?)

[Svein Ove Aas]

I'm currently working on a binding to Brian Gladman's C/assembler AES
implementation.

This code is sufficiently small that it makes little sense to create a
separate C library for it; furthermore, it isn't typically packaged by
the various linux distributions, never mind other OSs. As a result,
I'd like to make it part of the cabalized AES package.

This works well enough with the pure-C variant of the implementation,
but it also has assembly-based implementations of the core encryption
routines for x86 and x86_64, specifically using yasm, which I would
like to use when possible.

So, two problems..

- First, I need to make cabal detect yasm's presence, and call out to
it when appropriate. The former I can do with a configure script; the
latter, I'm not quite sure how to do. Currently, cabal can only do C;
basically, I'm looking for a way to let it use any language that can
be compiled to .o files.
- Second, having manually compiled the C/asm bits to .a and .so form,
I did eventually get cabal to link (seemingly) correctly against it,
but it then did not proceed to copy libaes.so into
~/.cabal/lib/AES/.... I'm not sure how to make it do that, either. I
suppose I'll have to use hooks, but I'd appreciate a little advice on
how, exactly

Well, I've put a snapshot of my current code at
http://brage.info/~svein/aes/, so you can have a look. I'd really
appreciate the help.

--
Svein Ove Aas