Re: installing non-haskell binaries with cabal

On Mon, 2008-06-09 at 16:22 -0700, Don Stewart wrote:

...

On 2008.06.09 23:36:19 +0100, Duncan Coutts scribbled 0.5K characters:

...

On Mon, 2008-06-09 at 23:35 +0200, Misha Aizatulin wrote:

...

hello,

I would like to distribute a shell script as part of my haskell project. How can I tell cabal to install the script as an

executable?

...

At the moment there is no easy way of doing that. It can be

installed as

...

a data file pretty easily but not into the $bindir.

You'd have to write a custom Setup.hs script and change the

...

...

hook. Use LocalBuildInfo.absoluteInstallDirs to get the bindir.

Duncan

And of course, at that point, you'd be better off just writing the

gwern0: postInst script in Haskell.

...

(Seriously, I had to do that for the Roguestar packages. It was

hardly

...

any trouble at all - Haskell is a better scripting language than I think people give it credit for.)

I'd agree here. It probably is easier to rewrite it in Haskell (just use system everywhere), and keep easy distribution via cabal-install.

Yikes. Every time I learn something new about Cabal, it's /always/ some new limitation, never a new feature. Are there any plans to someday permit doing things with Cabal the Cabal developers haven't added specific code for yet? jcc