On 09 August 2005 02:59, Isaac Jones wrote:

Ross Paterson writes:

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On Wed, Aug 03, 2005 at 07:27:01PM -0500, Brian Smith wrote:

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On 8/3/05, Ross Paterson wrote:

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3) New field data-files, a list of files to be copied to a place where an executable can find them (e.g. template-hsc.h for hsc2hs): Hugs: the directory containing the Main module GHC/Windows: the directory containing the executable GHC/Unix: /usr/local/share/<exename> plus a new function in System.Directory to return the name of this directory. That would address Dimitry's requirements in

How about allowing directories too, which would be copied recursively?

No objection to that.

This sounds good, except that I'm not sure that System.Directory is the right place for this. It could also go in Distribution somewhere, but either way may be fine.

Also, if we do this, we should probably specify the manner in which such a directory should be layed out so:

1) it doesn't get too cluttered 2) different packages don't stomp on each-other's files and 3) different versions of different packages can use the same filenames.

One stab at it (where dataFileDir :: FilePath) would be that your datafiles should be in:

System.Directory.dataFileDir `joinFilePath` (packageName ++ "-" packageVersion)

and this is where cabal will put it.

This overlaps with my --datadir proposal. I think that datadir should be configurable at Setup-time, with sensible defaults as per Ross's mail above. The default should at least be specified relative to $prefix (eg. if $prefix is /usr, I don't want $datadir to be /usr/local/share/<pkg>). Also, if the data files are machine-dependent then they should really go in $libdir rather than $datadir. The problem, of course, is how to get the value of $datadir to the program if it is configurable. I suggested a CPP symbol, but that is far from ideal (we don't do it this way in fptools projects any more for various reasons). Another option is to have the Setup script generate a file containing the declarations: -- paths.h prefix="/usr/local" bindir="bin" -- or absolute libdir="lib/foo-1.0/ghc-6.4" datadir="share/foo-1.0" which you can then #include into Haskell source. Another alternative, if you want to avoid CPP, is to have Setup generate a complete Haskell module with these declarations, but then you have to somehow choose an appropriate module name that doesn't clash. paths.h gets my vote. Anyone have any better ideas? Cheers, Simon