new Library Infrastructure spec.

[Isaac Jones]

"Iavor S. Diatchki" <diatchki at cse.ogi.edu> writes:

(snip)
> i am a linux user, and i want to download and play with a haskell
> (binary) library (say wxHaskell).
> however i am at university, where i don't have root permisions, so i
> cannot use rpm
> (as it has fixed installation path).  so i just want to put the
> library in my home directory and use it,
> but i don't want to have to recompile it, as this is slow and may
> require tools i don't have or i don't
> know how to use.  furthermore, if i don't like the library i should be
> able to still delete it,
> and somehow inform my haskell implementation that the library is not
> there anymore.
(snip)

This is what Simon mentioned in (2):

> Simon Marlow wrote:

(snip)

>> 2. Generic binary distribution, generated by './Setup.lhs bdist'

And we do hope to support it in the near future (probably at the 1.0
release), but it's not a priority for the 0.1 release.

BTW, this is somewhat tricky, since you clearly have to get someone
who has your platform to build it for you, just as they have to build
an RPM, so it's not clear that there will be a lot of "generic binary
distribution" packages out there.  Of course, this is a problem that's
inherant to binary distributions, not just Cabal.

GHC can actually be installed like this, btw.

peace,

  isaac