Re: [Haskell-cafe] Creating binary distributions with Cabal

On 20 August 2010 11:43, Duncan Coutts wrote:

On 20 August 2010 10:18, Christopher Done wrote:

...

Does Cabal have a way to produce binary distributions from a package?

No but it's not too hard to do.

If you actually want an RPM or a DEB etc, then look into the cabal2rpm etc tools, they help automate the process.

Thanks, I hadn't seen this! It's ideal for my specific use case. :-)

If you want a generic binary then:

You first prepare an image, but using:

cabal copy --destdir=./tmp/image/

Now you tar up the image directory, unpack it on the target.

Note that the prefix/paths you specified at configure time need to be the same on the target machine. There is no support yet on unix for relocatable / prefix independent binaries. In particular it needs the paths to be correct to be able to find data files.

Hmm, this is okay for me in this particular case anyway as I'm just giving a distribution to the production admins who then unpack it, i.e. I know the configuration of the target machine.

Right, config files you should just look in a per-user or global location. You can use a data file to store a default so that the program can work with no config file.

Seems reasonable when someone else says it. Wasn't sure if there might be a standard API for dealing with this. Thus far I've been relying on a --config=PATH argument to the program. I suppose a combination thereof encompasses most use cases. On 20 August 2010 18:25, John MacFarlane wrote:

Do you know about getAppUserDataDirectory in System.Directory?

Thanks, I'd forgotten about that.