PlaySpace Online!

Building

Clone the Shady packages

PlaySpace Online depends on two Haskell packages that are in active development: shady-gen and shady-graphics. First clone these two repositories from the links before and, in both repositories, check out the playspace-online branch:

$ cd /path/to/shady-gen
$ git checkout playspace-online
$ cd /path/to/shady-graphics
$ git checkout playspace-online

Install cabal-dev

$ cabal install cabal-dev

Build play-space-online

A short note on the .cabal file.

This web application depends on a lot of packages. Unfortunately, my experience is that specifying the version numbers loosely leads to mixed results on many architectures. Hence, every single package this application depends on is specified exactly in the .cabal file. This is okay, since no other package will ever depend on this application.

Thus, it will only build with GHC version 6.12.3. You may have noticed a file called play-space-online.cabal.ghc-6.12.3. In future there will be multiple .cabal.<ghc-version> files like this which you can copy over the real one in order to build with alternative versions of GHC.

Build it!

After you have checked out this repo:

$ cabal-dev add-source /path/to/shady-gen
$ cabal-dev add-source /path/to/shady-graphics
$ cabal-dev install --flags=production

Building again: an important note on cabal-dev

Perhaps you will hack on package shady-gen or shady-graphics and want to rebuild PlaySpace Online afterwards. If you do this be sure to run these commands again:

$ cabal-dev add-source /path/to/shady-gen
$ cabal-dev add-source /path/to/shady-graphics

The utility cabal-dev tarballs up the packages at a particular point in time. If you change the sources cabal-dev has no way of knowing.

Creating a .cabal file for other GHC versions

The way I discovered all the packages that PlaySpace Online depends on was to

• build it successfully by tinkering a lot.
• Run cabal install with the -v flag and dump the output to a file.
• grep for all lines beginning with selecting.

Some sed munging later I had a very long list of dependencies which I copy and pasted into the .cabal file.

If a contributor would like to do the same thing for other versions of GHC I'd be very grateful.