How to create a suitable .tar.gz file for use with `cabal upload`?

Question

The standard way to exchange the Haskell library with other programmers is to create the Cabal package and upload it to http://hackage.haskell.org . I wrote a library that I want to share, and I successfully created the Cabal package, using online recommendations for creating cabal files. I built the package and installed it locally - it works fine. Now I want to upload it to Hackage. But cabal upload wants the .tar.gz file. There are Cabal documentation error messages, and I cannot find what is supposed to be used in this .tar.gz or how I should create it.

Who knows or knows where I can find out how to create a .tar.gz that will work with cabal upload ?

Answer 1

From the wiki :

Since the code is cabbalized, we can create a tarball using cabal-install directly (you can also use runhaskell Setup.hs sdist, but you need tar on your system 1 ):

 $ cabal sdist Building source dist for haq-0.0... Source tarball created: dist/haq-0.0.tar.gz 

This has the advantage that Cabal will do a little more validation and ensure that the tarball has the structure that HackageDB expects. Please note that this requires a LICENSE file. It packs the files needed to create a project; to include other files (e.g. Test.hs in the above example and our README), we need to add:

 extra-source-files: Tests.hs README 

into the .cabal file so that everything is included.

Answer 2

Or if you use darcs,

 darcs dist 

Note that cabal sdist will only collect the files listed in the .cabal file, so you may need to add README, etc. in extra-source-files:

You can check that you have a valid tarball with

 cabal check 

which runs the same tests as Hackage.