[Haskell-cafe] Linux version of ghc-6.8.3 won't intall or run for me: "Floating point exception".

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hi, Haskell!

I've downloaded the ghc-6.8.3-i386-unknown-linux.tar.bz2 tarball, which
I expected to work on my GNU/Linux box (1.2 GHz Athlon, Debian Sarge).

I'm new at this game, though I'm thoroughly experienced with (and bear
deep battle scars from) GNU software in general.

./configure fails with "checking for path to top of build tree...
configure: error: cannot determine current directory".  This has been
reported before in this list, but I don't think anybody ever explained
the fault.

Further delving finds that the following statement in the configure
script triggers it:

    hardtop=`utils/pwd/pwd forwardslash`

.  utils/pwd/pwd, no matter how I call it, always crashes with "Floating
point exception".  Surely real numbers aren't involved in determining a
configuration - probably some floating point library or other is
missing from my system.

What is utils/pwd/pwd?  What's its purpose?  It's 460kB large (compared
with 14kb for /bin/pwd).  Is it a haskell implementation of Unix's pwd,
primarily intented for non-unixy OSs?

configure is supposed to ascertain my machine's config, so it's
particularly disappointing that it crashes because my config isn't what
it expects.  Should I report this as a bug?

#########################################################################

Anyhow, I hacked the configure script by replacing the above line by a
hard-coded value, thusly:

    hardtop=/home/acm/haskell/ghc-6.8.3

, and the configure script finished.  ;-)

So I did "make install", and the turgid messages rolled up my screen
until it crashed, the last few lines being:

nstall/lib/ghc-6.8.3"' -DPKG_DATADIR='"/home/acm/haskell/ghc-install/share/ghc-6.8.3"' package.conf.in \
    | grep -v '^#pragma GCC' \
    | sed -e 's/""//g' -e 's/:[   ]*,/: /g' \
    | /home/acm/haskell/ghc-6.8.3/utils/ghc-pkg/ghc-pkg.bin --global-conf /home/acm/haskell/ghc-install/lib/ghc-6.8.3/package.conf update - --force
    make[1]: *** [install] Error 136
    make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/acm/haskell/ghc-6.8.3/rts'
    make: *** [install] Error 2

Ah yes!  Error 136.  ;-)  Don't we just love GNU bread and butter
software?  It's not documented on the install man page either - or the
info page.  Neither is Error 8.

Hey, you've all been through this too: enthusiasm -> 0 as t -> infinity.
:-(

#########################################################################

So, I thought, who needs to install?  It's a binary package, so somewhere
there's going to be a top-level callable program, probably called
something like "ghc".  Hey, yes, compile/Stage3/ghc-6.8.3.  Guess what:
"Floating point exception".  :-(

I hate binary packages - I utterly loathe them.  They never work.  At
least they never work for me.  Or the distro package manager stuffs your
cron config with resource hoggers you really don't want, and forgets to
ask you first.  I suppose they might work if your OS has been installed
or updated within the last few months; otherwise, forget it.  Source
distributions are so much faster and easier to install because the
cranial clutter you have to cope with is that much less.

Trouble is, to build haskell from source, you need a working haskell to
build it with.  Presumably, sometime in the recent past (as measured on
archaeological time scales), ghc was bootstrapped from C (or some other
lowest common denomiator language).  Is this route still available?  Some
proto-proto haskell written in C, sufficiently powerful to build a
proto-haskell, sufficiently powerful to build the compiler?

#########################################################################

I'd really love to play with haskell.  But the time I've wasted so far,
trying to get it working, is almost at the stage where I just can't be
bothered any more.  I've been here before, and I can see that I've got 1
- 3 days x 8 hours of grinding drudgery before I finally get ghc-6.8.3
working.  I suppose that's just the way GNU systems are.

If anybody could give me some tips as to getting a decent haskell running
on my system in a reasonable, predictable amount of time, in a way which
doesn't involve diagnosing and fixing problems, I'd be very grateful
indeed.

Thanks!

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).