Support for Mac users!

This will be a short announcement about al, a Haskell wrapper to the OpenAL C library.

Currently, the wrapper has been successfully tested on Linux – at least it works well on my Archlinux distro. I made a little program that reads from an .ogg file and streams the PCM signal to the wrapper – see libvorbis for further details. I’ll release the program later on if I find the spare time.

The wrapper might also work on Windows as long as you have pkg-config installed. I’d be very happy with feedback from people working on Windows. I don’t want anyone be put apart with my packages.

However, I’ve never tested the wrapper on Mac OS X. I guessed it wouldn’t work out of the box because Mac OS X doesn’t use regular libraries to compile and link – that would have been too easy otherwise, and hell, think different right? They use something called a framework. It’s possible to include a framework in a Haskell project by fulfilling the frameworks field in the .cabal file. I received a simple patch to do that – here, and I merged it upstream.

Then, Mac OS X is now officially supported. The release version is the 0.1.4.

About stackage

There’s something else I’d like to discuss. Quickly after the first release of al, I decided to push it onto stackage. Unfortunately, there’s a problem with the package and Ubuntu. For a very dark reason, Ubuntu doesn’t expose anything when invoking pkg-confg --cflags, even if the files are there – on Ubuntu they can be found in /usr/include/AL.

That’s very silly because I don’t want to hardcode the location – it might be something else on other Linux distro. The problem might be related to the OpenAL support in Ubuntu – the .pc file used by pkg-config might be incomplete. So if you experience that kind of issue, you can fix it by passing the path to your OpenAL headers:

cabal install al --extra-include-dirs=/usr/include/AL

If OpenAL is installed somewhere else, consider using:

find / -name al.h

I’ll do my best to quickly fix that issue.