How to redistribute wxHaskell apps?

Question

I am using ghc 7.6.3. I installed wxHaskell from here: https://github.com/wxHaskell/wxHaskell

It worked, the sample programs compile and the run successfully.

The only problem now is that I want to distribute a wxHaskell application on mac OS X. I tried using macosx-app and cabal-macosx (https://github.com/michaelt/cabal-macosx) to make an "app" file. It runs fine on my machine, but it fails to run on another computer. I get the following error:

Dyld Error Message: Library not loaded: /Users/user/.cabal/lib/wxc-0.90.1.0/ghc-7.6.3/libwxc.dylib.

I am using OS X 10.8.4 (Mountain Lion), but I would be also interested in compiling apps on Windows and redistribute them too.

What would be the best way to redistribute wxHaskell apps?

Setup.hs

-- Example Setup.hs for the wxHello app.

import Distribution.MacOSX
import Distribution.Simple

main :: IO ()
main = defaultMainWithHooks $ simpleUserHooks {
         postBuild = appBundleBuildHook guiApps -- no-op if not MacOS X
       }

guiApps :: [MacApp]
guiApps = [MacApp "WxHello"
                  (Just "resources/WxHello.icns")
                  Nothing -- Build a default Info.plist for the icon.
                  [] -- No other resources.
                  [] -- No other binaries.
                  ChaseWithDefaults -- Try changing to ChaseWithDefaults
          ]

wxHello.cabal:

Name:                   wxHello
Version:                0.1.0
Stability:              Alpha
Synopsis:               wxWidgets `Hello World' example for cabal-macosx
Description:
    Example showing how to use cabal-macosx to build an application
    bundle for a simple `Hello World' program using the wxWidgets GUI
    toolkit.
Category:               Data
License:                BSD3
License-file:           LICENSE
Copyright:              Andy Gimblett <[email protected]>
Author:                 Andy Gimblett <[email protected]>
Maintainer:             Andy Gimblett <[email protected]>
Build-Type:             Custom
Cabal-Version:          >=1.6

Executable WxHello
  hs-source-dirs:       src
  Main-is:              Main.hs
  Build-Depends:        base >= 3 && < 5, cabal-macosx, wx
  ghc-options:          -fwarn-tabs -threaded -Wall

Here are the dylib files inside the generated package:

WxHello.app $ find . | grep dylib
./Contents/Frameworks/Users/user/.cabal/lib/wxc-0.90.1.0/ghc-7.6.3/libwxc.dylib
./Contents/Frameworks/Users/user/temp/wxWidgets-2.9.5/build-release/lib/libwx_baseu-2.9.5.0.0.dylib
./Contents/Frameworks/Users/user/temp/wxWidgets-2.9.5/build-release/lib/libwx_baseu_net-2.9.5.0.0.dylib
./Contents/Frameworks/Users/user/temp/wxWidgets-2.9.5/build-release/lib/libwx_baseu_xml-2.9.5.0.0.dylib
./Contents/Frameworks/Users/user/temp/wxWidgets-2.9.5/build-release/lib/libwx_osx_cocoau_adv-2.9.5.0.0.dylib
./Contents/Frameworks/Users/user/temp/wxWidgets-2.9.5/build-release/lib/libwx_osx_cocoau_aui-2.9.5.0.0.dylib
./Contents/Frameworks/Users/user/temp/wxWidgets-2.9.5/build-release/lib/libwx_osx_cocoau_core-2.9.5.0.0.dylib
./Contents/Frameworks/Users/user/temp/wxWidgets-2.9.5/build-release/lib/libwx_osx_cocoau_gl-2.9.5.0.0.dylib
./Contents/Frameworks/Users/user/temp/wxWidgets-2.9.5/build-release/lib/libwx_osx_cocoau_html-2.9.5.0.0.dylib
./Contents/Frameworks/Users/user/temp/wxWidgets-2.9.5/build-release/lib/libwx_osx_cocoau_propgrid-2.9.5.0.0.dylib
./Contents/Frameworks/Users/user/temp/wxWidgets-2.9.5/build-release/lib/libwx_osx_cocoau_qa-2.9.5.0.0.dylib
./Contents/Frameworks/Users/user/temp/wxWidgets-2.9.5/build-release/lib/libwx_osx_cocoau_ribbon-2.9.5.0.0.dylib
./Contents/Frameworks/Users/user/temp/wxWidgets-2.9.5/build-release/lib/libwx_osx_cocoau_richtext-2.9.5.0.0.dylib
./Contents/Frameworks/Users/user/temp/wxWidgets-2.9.5/build-release/lib/libwx_osx_cocoau_stc-2.9.5.0.0.dylib
./Contents/Frameworks/Users/user/temp/wxWidgets-2.9.5/build-release/lib/libwx_osx_cocoau_webview-2.9.5.0.0.dylib
./Contents/Frameworks/Users/user/temp/wxWidgets-2.9.5/build-release/lib/libwx_osx_cocoau_xrc-2.9.5.0.0.dylib
./Contents/Frameworks/usr/lib/libc++abi.dylib
./Contents/Frameworks/usr/lib/libexpat.1.dylib
./Contents/Frameworks/usr/lib/libiconv.2.dylib
./Contents/Frameworks/usr/lib/libstdc++.6.dylib
./Contents/Frameworks/usr/lib/libz.1.dylib

Answer 1

The last redistributable I made in Windows with wxHaskell needed the files

• mingwm10.dll and
• wxmws28u_gcc.dll

to be in the same folder as the .exe (not just somewhere on my path).

This was using a previous version of wxHaskell, which compiled against a previous version of wxWidgits itself, so presumably you'd need the wx dll to have 29 in it rather than 28.

I compiled with static linking too:

ghc -static -optl-static -optl-mwindows Main -o Project.exe

the -optl-mwindows gets rid of the command prompt window which would otherwise appear alongside your app.

Answer 2

It might be helpful to include your .cabal and Setup.hs files.

From the documentation on cabal-macosx, it seems that you need to ensure that your MacApp data value in Setup.hs gets the appropriate mode for ChaseDeps (use ChaseWithDefaults instead of DoNotChase) in order to build redistributable app bundles.

If you have done that but still get the same error, I would check inside the resulting app bundle to see if the necessary libraries got copied in there at all. You may find enough information to file a bug with the cabal-macosx maintainer.

Edit

Based on what you've included, the setup looks correct, and it appears to have at least copied the library dependencies in. I think the problem is probably with the cabal-macosx package.

Looking at the source code to the dependency-fixup code, it looks like it should have printed a bunch of "Updating <library>'s dependence on <path> to <path>" lines as it was building the bundle. Did you see those? Were there any lines updating the binary itself?

I am not very experienced with the OS X linking process, but I would think that unless the binary is linked after copying the libraries, it would need to be updated as well. You should be able to use /usr/bin/otool -L <filename> and /usr/bin/install_name_tool to manually fix up the paths in binaries the install process may have missed.

Here are the man pages for those two tools:

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/install_name_tool.1.html

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/otool.1.html