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:
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:
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.


Michal



On Tue, Mar 18, 2014 at 1:59 PM, David Thomas <davidleothomas@gmail.com> wrote:
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 <danburton.email@gmail.com> wrote:
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 <davidleothomas@gmail.com> wrote:
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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