Ketil Malde wrote:
(Reposted to café - my -libraries mail seems to have gotten lost along the way)
I'm building an interface to a C library, which comes in the form of two .a files. I can't seem to get Cabal to link statically with these, so that the resulting package (libHSfoo-v.v.a) is self contained.
I've tried fiddling with Cabal's ld-options and extra-libraries, but so far with no success - loading my package either results in GHC looking for (and failing to find) .so files, or "unknown symbol".
A static library doesn't normally specify what it links to, that all happens at link time. So if you say -optl-static when linking your program, it won't have any dependencies on shared libraries. What you actually want to do, I suspect, is to include verbatim copies of the .a dependencies in your (binary) Cabal package, to make it self-contained. Cabal doesn't have a way to do that at the moment. But it's quite easy: just copy the .a files from /usr/lib (or wherever) and put them in the same place as your libHSpackage.a.
PS: did --user stop working (with GHC 20060607)? I'm adding --user to both 'configure' and 'install', but Cabal still wants to put things in /usr/local.
I don't think anything changed: --user never changed the install prefix, it only ever changed where dependencies are found. To install in your home dir, you also need to say --prefix=$HOME. Cheers, Simon