Package `hie` binaries

[samuelpilz]

I would like to package the hie binaries with some linux package managers (maybe starting with by distribution archlinux and put the package haskell-ide-engine-bin on the aur)

I am not quite sure what is needed for a correct build of hie. Could it be that it is necessary to:

• install hie-* to $PATH
• install hie-wrapper to $PATH
• install cabal-helper-wrapper to $PATH

[mpickering]

HIE is packed for nix already. It could be useful to look at that to see what wrappers are needed and so on - https://github.com/domenkozar/hie-nix

[LinArcX]

For arch linux users:
You can now download binary version from archlinuxcn repo:
archlinuxcn/repo#1044

[samuelpilz]

I have tried to analyze this situation. A standalone-binary distribution faces the issue that there are many runtime dependencies. Some of them cannot be easily provided by a binary-distribution. Having stack and the binary hie is not sufficient.

I have done:

1. build hie on the host machine
2. setup a fresh VM (archlinux), install stack and git and setup path for .local/bin
3. copy hie binary to guest VM
4. install atom and visual studio code (from archlinux repositories) and appropriate plugins
5. Nothing worked. Errors: hoogle db not found and cabal-install not installed,
6. I did stack build hoogle; stack exec hoogle generate
7. stack install cabal-install
8. Nothing worked. error: $HOME/.local/bin/data/hlint.yaml was not found
9. create empty file $HOME/.local/bin/data/hlint.yaml
10. Nothing worked. errors: cabal-helper-wrapper not found.
11. Copy cabal-helper-wrapper (found via stack exec which -- cabal-helper-wrapper) from host
12. Nothing worked. Error: file .../.stack/.../ghc-8.6.4/lib/ghc-8.6.4/settings missing (path is to ghc on host, which was used to compile ``)
13. building cabal-helper from within the guest was not successful (Could not resolve dependencies ...).
14. I gave up (for now)

Conclusion
I found runtime-dependencies:

• cabal-install
• hoogle database generated by stack exec hoogle generate
• $HOME/.local/bin/data/hlint.yaml needs to be there, for whatever reason
• cabal-helper-wrapper needs to be present in cabal_helper_libexecdir.
• some settings file needs to be present for cabal-helper-wrapper

I would be interested in what the nix package does to mitigate these problems but I have not the experience with nix so I cannot find out how they do it