On Sun, 2011-01-30 at 05:20 -0500, Ryan Newton wrote:
I am trying to link a ".a" file built by a separate makefile into my library. GHC has no problem with it, but I need to convince cabal to do it for the package to be hackage-friendly. There's a thread about this back in 2007:
http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/cabal-devel/2007-April/000507.html
Is there a method for this now, or is the state of affairs the same as before?
Having a Haskell package link against an external C library is straightforward, you just list it in the extra-libraries field. The external library must already be installed on the system however. Bundling a copy of the external library with a cabal package is not quite so easy. You will have to write code in the Setup.hs to call the separate makefile during the build (and perhaps extra steps at configure time too). Your best bet is probably to use the "simple" build system's hooks API. You can list the library in the extra-libraries field in the .cabal file but you will also need to modify the check for external libraries that are done in the postConf hook (since the separate .a library will not be available at configure time): modify the package description that gets passed to the postConf hook to exclude the library. Duncan