Re: [Haskell-cafe] Listing native package requirements based on cabal information

Hmm, but then, not all package managers/repositories use the same names for packages. So even if there were a way to extract the required libraries from cabal, feeding that information to the package manager isn't going to be trivial at all. (And frankly, looking at build systems for other languages, I've never seen anything that does this - even autotools doesn't really do a lot more than check whether a library is available). That said, even if we could just get a list of required libraries out of cabal, in a somewhat human and machine readable format, that would be a huge win in itself. On Tue, Mar 18, 2014 at 11:48:33AM -0700, David Thomas wrote:

One option that just occurred to me would be to allow passing a script to cabal that could be passed the extra-libraries (if any), and could install if it knew the relevant OS packages (or NIX packages), or abort with a cleaner error message.

Actually, wrapping ghc might be sufficient (though not ideal).

On Tue, Mar 18, 2014 at 11:29 AM, Michal Antkiewicz < mantkiew@gsd.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:

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This is not an immediate solution but I can imagine listing NIX packages as dependencies inside a cabal file, then NIX would create a sandbox with these dependencies and cabal would build in that sandbox. The advantages are that you're not messing around with the underlying operating system's packages, NIX handles all dependencies transitively, and everything is specified declaratively. Sounds like a nice GSoC project :-) You could also do cross GHC version's builds as GHC itself can be sandboxed. Quite intriguing.

Michal

On Tue, Mar 18, 2014 at 2:16 PM, Michal Antkiewicz < mantkiew@gsd.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:

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Certainly NIX is an interesting approach. It already comes with a large base of dependencies, a format for specifying them. NIX can be installed in any Linux distro and serve as an environment for building packages. That might provide a cross-distribution solution to the native dependency problem.

See, a nice post by Oliver Charles

http://ocharles.org.uk/blog/posts/2014-02-04-how-i-develop-with-nixos.html

Michal

On Tue, Mar 18, 2014 at 1:59 PM, David Thomas wrote:

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Ok, well, if that's the case I'd like to see about remedying that. Anyone have any thoughts as to how to best go about this? I'm not clear on exactly what info lives where, especially across systems. Entirely manual population would be a (barely) acceptable fallback.

On Tue, Mar 18, 2014 at 9:36 AM, Dan Burton wrote:

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I have wished for this on multiple occasions. I don't believe such a thing exists as of yet.

-- Dan Burton

On Tue, Mar 18, 2014 at 9:26 AM, David Thomas

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wrote:

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Is there a way to extract this? I'm looking to make it easier for newcomers to my project to get things building across different linux distros.

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