Hi Johan,

Originally, that was my intention, to have the user install the library himself,
and I have specified the extra-libraries field in the .cabal file.

However, the problem with hackage not being able to build the package, and
therefore generate documentation, remains. So conversely my question would be
if there is any way to get around this?

Best regards,
Max.

On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 8:21 PM, Johan Tibell <johan.tibell@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Maksymilian,

Generally I don't recommend that you bundle C libraries with your
Cabal package. On Linux users should get C libraries through their
distribution's package manager. The people who package Cabal packages
for Debian (as Debian packages) can then have the Debian package they
create depend on the C library's package, making sure it gets
installed automatically.

You can list the library name in an extra-libraries field in your
.cabal file to communicate to users that they need this library
installed. There's a little bit of documentation on the
extra-libraries field in the Cabal User Guide
(http://www.haskell.org/cabal/users-guide/developing-packages.html#library).

Cheers,
Johan