Question

I intend to distribute an F# program as both binary and source so the user has the option of recompiling it if desired. On Windows, I understand how to do this: provide .fsproj and .sln files, which both Visual Studio and MSBuild can understand.

On Linux, the traditional solution for C programs is a makefile. This depends on gcc being directly available, which it always is.

The F# compiler can be installed on Linux and works under Mono, so that’s fine so far. However, as far as I can tell, it doesn’t create a scenario where fsc runs the compiler, instead the command is mono ...path.../fsc.exe. This is also fine, except I don’t know what the path is going to be. So the full command to run the compiler in my case could be mono ~/FSharp-2.0.0.0/bin/fsc.exe types.fs tptp.fs main.fs -r FSharp.PowerPack.dll except that I’m not sure where fsc.exe will actually be located on the user’s machine.

Is there a way to find that out within a makefile, or would it be better to fall back on just explaining the above in the documentation and relying on the user to modify the command according to his setup?

Answer 1

If you don’t want to use autoconf just write up README and say us how to setup tools to compile your program.
For example, you can require as to use binfmt_misc kernel module to allow system to automatically use right starter program for files with known format as to $PATH must contain path to fsc.exe, so your Makefile simply will be like following code:

FILES=types.fs tptp.fs main.fs

target.exe: ${FILES}
        fsc.exe -o $@  ${FILES} -r FSharp.PowerPack.dll

Or you can allow user to point to compiler by using makefile variables:

MONO=/usr/bin/mono
FSC=/usr/local/fsharp/bin/fsc.exe
COMPILER=${MONO} ${FSC}
FILES=types.fs tptp.fs main.fs

target.exe: ${FILES}
        ${COMPILER} -o $@  ${FILES} -r FSharp.PowerPack.dll