I am pleased to announce the pre-release of the FFI Imports Packaging Utility (ffipkg), a new member of the HSFFIG package. The `ffipkg' utility prepares a Haskell package containing FFI imports for building by accepting locations of C header and foreign library files as command line arguments and producing Haskell source files with FFI declarations, a Makefile, a Cabal package descriptor file, and a Setup.hs file suitable for running the Cabal package setup program. The utility acts as a "driver" running the C preprocessor, the equivalent of the hsffig program, and the source splitter. Everybody working on a project involving imports from foreign libraries: feel free to try it out. Any feedback will be appreciated. Suggested reading: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/FFI_Imports_Packaging_Utility How to get it: This pre-release is available from the darcs repo only: no new downloads have been added yet to the project page at sourceforge.net. darcs get --partial http://hsffig.sourceforge.net/repos/hsffig-1.1 Run `make' first Then run Setup.hs as usual to configure/build/install the package. Don't forget to specify path to Alex if it is not on the default PATH. The package installs as HSFFIG-1.1 Requirements: GHC >=6.4 (I use 6.4.1) Cabal >= 1.1.3 (older version may not work because of excutables install bug and missing parts of API). For Cabal from darcs, read about the "new userHooks" option of ffipkg. Alex is needed Packages parsec and FilePath are needed. The package also contains an unfinished "xmldump" utility which depends on the hxt (XML Toolbox) package. Please let me know if this is a great inconvenience: I may remove it from the release. Hope that this utility will be useful for the developers. -- Dimitry Golubovsky Anywhere on the Web