Wednesday, August 03, 2016

Scratching an itch: generating Cabal data-files field automatically

Maybe I didn't look hard enough, but I'm not aware of a tool to generate the contents of the Cabal data-files field automatically when you have loads of folders to include. Cabal has very simple wildcard matching for files references in this field, by design (to avoid including too much data in a source distribution). So it only supports wildcards to replace the file name inside a directory for a given extension, and doesn't support sub directories.

For the reload project - first release on Hackage! - I had to include loads of files, all the Polymer web components the UI depends on, which are all on different sub directories, with a bunch of different extensions. So I wrote a little tool to generate the field automatically, and put it on Hackage too.

You pass it a directory name, possibly some subdirectories and extensions to ignore, and it generates all the required entries. Saved me loads of time, and scratched my own itch!