Re: [wxhaskell-users] Is with-* reasonable for supporting wxWidgets contrib libraries? (Was: pinging wxhaskell...

[Jeremy O'D. <jer...@gm...>]

Hmm,

Somehow I missed this when I sent out a mail on almost the same
subject just now...

On 16/08/07, Eric Y. Kow <eri...@gm...> wrote:
> > 2. Support contrib libraries in default configuration.
> >     Merit
> >     - The reverse side of 1.'s Demerit.
> >     Demerit
> >     - User must build and install contrib libraries, before building
> >       wxHaskell. So they can meet building problem. But we can solve
> >       it by updating building Guide (And I'm doing that).

This really only works as an option if we decide that users must build
wxWidgets from source *before* they can build wxHaskell.

> You seem to be saying that this is the simpler choice as far as the code
> goes.  I also get the impression that it is the most straightforwardly
> extensible, so I suppose this is what I would support.

It is certainly the simplest option in terms of maintaining wxHaskell,
but I think it means that we need to provide compiled binary packages
for wxWidgets on all supported platforms, since it is not particularly
straightforward to build wxWidgets appropriately for use with
wxHaskell (especially under the latest versions of Visual Studio -
Microsoft have replaced DLL hell with manifest hell. Grr...)

It's likely to be irritating to Linux users who are used to "apt-get
install wxWidgets" as their usual approach to installing libraries.

I've detailed what would probably be needed to cleanly support contrib
in the other mail. In short, it's a directory structure (and Haskell
modules) per contrib module. I'd prefer to do it in as clean a manner
as possible, but I admit that it's far from easy to get right.

Regards
Jeremy