The design rationale for the OpenGL/GLUT/OpenAL/ALUT packages is that they should exactly mirror the standardize native API behind them in a Haskell-friendly way. GLUT is only a simple, portable GUI for OpenGL-based program (handling windows, menus, callbacks, etc.) and it has no support for loading images, therefore the GLUT package will never have such a facility, either.
Sure, only the GLUT api should be mirrored, but i was thinking that since ALUT do have a few facilities to load audio files, why should not have GLUT itself some facility to load images? BTW, this was just a (slightly offtopic) personal consideration.
It might be an interesting project to write a nice Haskell binding to the Developer's Image Library (DevIL, see http://www.imagelib.org/) or Imlib2 (http://www.enlightenment.org/Libraries/Imlib2/). An alternative is to mirror only the design and actually do a re-write of the whole library in Haskell.
And imagemagick would be another possibility too. Sure, but this is problably is quite a bit of work (even just a binding, without rewriting all funcionalities), i just wrote a bare minimum library to create a texture from an image in an opengl program. i think it will be useful for instance if you want to write a program using just GLUT, to be able to load some texture, because you can just incude it. That's it, nothing more and nothing less.
An IIRC, there is already a Haskell binding for SDL, but I am not so sure about how complete it is and if it is still maintained.
hSDL is not complete, most important for me was that the OpenGL part and the SDL bindings are not yet done. Of course a more definitive solution would be to complete the hSDL bindings (BTW i don't know if it is still maintained, last release is of 2005 April 12), as SDL is a much more general purpose library than GLUT. -- Ciao Maurizio "Well we all shine on Like the moon and the stars and the sun" (John Lennon)