Volunteering

[Gregory Collins]

Joe Thornber <joe.thornber at gmail.com> writes:

> Hi,
>
> I have a couple of hours per week to spare that I could use to help
> with the OS X release.

Hi Joe,

I would appreciate some help, for sure. You can download my
work-in-progress here:

    http://github.com/gregorycollins/cabal2macpkg/tree

Duncan asked for some information re: how this tool will work; I'll dash
off some quick thoughts here and also will update the ticket & wiki.

The "cabal2macpkg" program will take a .cabal package and turn it into a
mac installer file. I envision it having two modes: 

    1. take a single .cabal library and make a .pkg file

    2. read a .cabal file, turn all of its dependencies into .pkg files,
       and package those up together into an .mpkg file.


I've gotten most of the way through the first part; the process goes:

    1. find a .cabal file in the current working directory

    2. run "cabal build; cabal haddock" into a staging area

    3. run "cabal register --gen-pkg-config" and postprocess the results
       to generate a registration script that will be run by the OS X
       installer

    4. turn the staging area into a mac package file using the OS X
       developer tools

Progress on this project has been slow-going, Apple's documentation for
this stuff is horrible. Right now I'm using the old (10.4) interface to
the packagemaker tool because I can't find enough authoritative
information about the inputs to the Leopard version.

If anyone wants to discuss this project with me, I'll try to be on
#haskell; my nick is "gcollins". This project has been on my backburner
for a while but I intend to invest some time in it to try to make the
deadline.

G.
-- 
Gregory Collins <greg at gregorycollins.net>