#816: c-sources get passed to GHC instead of gcc ----------------------------+----------------------------------------------- Reporter: guest | Owner: Type: defect | Status: new Priority: normal | Milestone: Component: Cabal library | Version: 1.8.0.6 Severity: normal | Keywords: Difficulty: unknown | Ghcversion: Platform: | ----------------------------+----------------------------------------------- I realize this may be hard to fix and only rarely a problem, but I think it's worth creating a ticket to track it. Files specified as c-sources are handed to GHC instead of gcc. This is normally fine, but there are times when a file that gcc could handle is rejected by GHC. For example, .m files are rejected by GHC because it thinks they are linker scripts but gcc accepts them as objective-c. See for example this ticket: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/5025 It's not a common problem, but when you do bump into it, it's a HUGE pain to work around and leaves you as a user with a sense of being artificially limited by your build system. The pain is exacerbated because the work around seems to require that you: * Build the c-sources that GHC won't accept using some other means, say a makefile, and build it into libfoo.a * Switch to Build-type: Custom * Then you have to modify Setup.hs to call your makefile during an early step such as preConf * Then you need copy and postInst steps that put libfoo.a in a place where it can be found when building things that depend on your package. * With newer GHCs you need to add --force during the package registration because the "extra" library will technically have a relative path and ghc-pkg doesn't like this (for a good reason, I assume). * 'cabal sdist' will complain unless you are careful (read: sneaky). All of the above can be done, but it's a lot of work for something that could be very simple. For a working example see this package: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/GLFW-b-0.0.2.3 -- Ticket URL: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ticket/816 Hackage http://haskell.org/cabal/ Hackage: Cabal and related projects