[Haskell-cafe] Dynamic package information with Setup.hs

[Ivan Lazar Miljenovic]

On 22 November 2013 07:10, Peter Simons <simons at cryp.to> wrote:
> Hi Thiago,
>
>  > I've written a shell script that will download and build this C
>  > library to a subdirectory of the user's
>  > HOME(~/.cabal-tmp/{lib,include}).
>
> please don't do that. It's notoriously hard to get this use case right
> so that it works for everybody. Some people may want that library built
> as a shared object; others may want it with profiling and/or debug
> information. The next guy may want that library compiled with a
> different version of GCC than the one GHC uses by default. Others may
> want to link bindings to a copy of that library that's installed in
> their system (under a path that you cannot guess).

Not to mention that it doesn't work well for people wanting to build
it on a distro level (or even to compile and distribute across
multiple machines).

>
> What you should do is to add
>
>   Extra-Libraries:      my-external-library
>
> to your Cabal file and trust that the user specifies appropriate flags
> at configure time to ensure that the compiler can find it if necessary.
>
> You can distribute a shell script that tries to build the C library and
> the Haskell library with convenient defaults, i.e. your script should
> call
>
>   cabal configure --extra-include-dirs=PATH --extra-lib-dirs=PATH
>
> with appropriate paths after having built the C code, but please make
> sure that your Haskell package works fine for people who want to build
> the C library themselves without using your script.
>
> Take care,
> Peter
>
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-- 
Ivan Lazar Miljenovic
Ivan.Miljenovic at gmail.com
http://IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com