Compilation issues on NixOS + Wayland

[menaceinfrills]

Hi!
I'm trying to use GLFW-b for a little practice project in Nix, but somehow this library fails to build. I get the following error:

❯ cabal build
Warning: The package list for 'hackage.haskell.org' is 19 days old.
Run 'cabal update' to get the latest list of available packages.
Resolving dependencies...
Build profile: -w ghc-9.6.6 -O1
In order, the following will be built (use -v for more details):
 - bindings-GLFW-3.3.9.2 (lib) (requires build)
 - GLFW-b-1.4.8.4 (lib) (requires build)
 - Haskell-OpenGL-0.1.0.0 (exe:Haskell-OpenGL) (configuration changed)
Starting     bindings-GLFW-3.3.9.2 (lib)

Failed to build bindings-GLFW-3.3.9.2. The failure occurred during the
configure step.
Build log (
/home/name/.cache/cabal/logs/ghc-9.6.6/bindings-GLFW-3.3.9.2-d2f35b21b8160c888c4e9e375534e12310bd80118bb81124345802c1e567737d.log
):
Configuring library for bindings-GLFW-3.3.9.2...
Error: [Cabal-4345]
Missing dependencies on foreign libraries:
* Missing (or bad) C libraries: X11, Xi, Xrandr, Xxf86vm, Xcursor, Xinerama
This problem can usually be solved by installing the system packages that provide these libraries (you may need the "-dev" versions). If the libraries are already installed but in a non-standard location then you can use the flags --extra-include-dirs= and --extra-lib-dirs= to specify where they are.If the library files do exist, it may contain errors that are caught by the C compiler at the preprocessing stage. In this case you can re-run configure with the verbosity flag -v3 to see the error messages.

Error: [Cabal-7125]
Failed to build bindings-GLFW-3.3.9.2 (which is required by exe:Haskell-OpenGL from Haskell-OpenGL-0.1.0.0). See the build log above for details.

It says I'm missing a couple X11 libraries, which makes sense as I'm running wayland (with xwayland enabled).
I'm not sure how to continue...

[menaceinfrills]

Build passes when the following packages are added (to a development shell):

xorg.libX11
xorg.libXi
xorg.libXrandr
xorg.libXcursor
xorg.libXinerama
xorg.libXxf86vm

[Mokosha]

A Wayland dev box is not really readily available so it's difficult to test changes that are needed to fix this. If you'd like to submit a patch to the cabal file that avoids the appropriate X libraries so that this builds without these dependencies then you'll likely have wide latitude to make it happen.

[bflyblue]

I've been working on updating the bindings to GLFW 3.4 on my fork and ran into the same NixOS issues along the way. There are a couple of approaches depending on what you need:

Quick fix for the current version: The X11 libraries are needed at build time even on Wayland because the cabal file unconditionally lists them in extra-libraries. Adding them to your dev shell (as you found) is the simplest workaround, even if you're only using Wayland at runtime.

Using the system GLFW: Normally you could avoid the bundled source issues by building with -fsystem-GLFW, but the current Hackage release pins glfw3 == 3.3.* and nixpkgs ships 3.4, so that won't work out of the box.

My fork: I have a branch (flake) on my fork (https://github.com/bflyblue/bindings-GLFW/tree/flake) with a flake.nix that builds against nixpkgs' system GLFW 3.4 (which already has NixOS dlopen patches for Wayland). The update-glfw-3.4 branch also adds proper Wayland cabal flags so you can build the bundled sources with -f Wayland -f -X to skip X11 entirely.