I filed a ticket for this issue: http://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/8414 -Andi On Sat, Oct 5, 2013 at 11:56 AM, Andreas Voellmy wrote:

Christiaan suggested that I try cabal installing "--disable-library-vanilla" which I combined with --enable-shared. It almost works. It causes ghc to only create the dynamic libraries. However, ghc-pkg register fails with the error:

/usr/local/bin/ghc-pkg update - --global --user --package-db=dist/package.conf.inplace cabal: TestLib-0.1.0.0: cannot find libHSTestLib-0.1.0.0.a on library path (use --force to override) Failed to install TestLib-0.1.0.0

It seems that ghc-pkg thinks that we must have the .a files to register the package. (I scanned the ghc-pkg source and it looks like checkHSLib is where this check happens.)

So, is the check in ghc-pkg really correct? I.e. the package would be unusable without the .a file? Or would this be OK, so we really should change ghc-pkg?

-Andi

On Fri, Oct 4, 2013 at 6:35 PM, Andreas Voellmy

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wrote:

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Hi all,

Is it possible to have a Haskell package that only includes a dynamic library and .dyn_hi files? I.e. it would omit the .o and .a files? I tried building a library using cabal and --enable-shared. It still includes the .o and .a files.

Will builds with "-dynamic" and loading modules in ghci work correctly if I just delete the .o and .a files? I did a few experiments and it seems to work OK, although it seems that things break if I delete the .hi files, even though I'd expect only the .dyn_hi files would be used.

-Andi