Re: [developers] ElixirFM 1.1 Update + Wiki + API

[Otakar Smrz <otakar dot smrz at mff dot cuni dot cz>]

Dear Ahmed,

I unfortunately do not have direct experience with making Debian 
packages. Let me reply item-by-item below, hopefully it will make 
sense and help you :)

> * The Haskel tarball, is it a Haskel program or library ?

The Haskell tarball is a standard Haskell package which is best 
installed using the Cabal framework. There is a dependency on the 
Encode library, see below. The tarball contains sources for both the 
library code and the source for the executable. During installation, 
the dependencies are downloaded from the Hackage repository, the 
library is compiled, the executable is compiled, and all is installed 
where expected on the particular system. All can be done with one 
command, namely `cabal install`. Please see this if needed:

http://www.haskell.org/cabal/


> * The Perl module, does it depend on Haskel program/library ?

The Perl module does not depend on the Haskell library. You can use it 
independently. However, there is a module called Exec::ElixirFM in the 
package which you can use to invoke the `elixir` executable compiled 
from the Haskell source. If you do not have this executable installed 
in your path, then Exec::ElixirFM will warn you at runtime, and will 
return empty strings as results, instead of some reasonable output 
that `elixir` would produce if it were correctly installed.


> * Another thing, I see that you require Encode, yet the only Encode 
>   I found on sourceforge, was ElixirFM-Encode-1.0.zip which has both 
>   ElixirFM (probably an old version) and Encode, can't you have 
>   Encode in a separate tarball/zip archive ?

The Encode Haskell library is a dependency for the ElixirFM Haskell 
library. Normally, Encode is downloaded from the Hackage repository. 
At the moment, there is Encode version 1.2 on Hackage. However, there 
is another place where I publish this library. It is the Encode Arabic 
project of SourceForge, and it contains version 1.3 now. If you would 
like to include Encode 1.3, please download Encode-1.3.tar.gz from

http://sourceforge.net/projects/encode-arabic/files/

You can then install it using `cabal install` again.


Hope this helps :) Please let me know if you have more questions.

Best regards,

Otakar