[Haskell-beginners] GHC installation on RHEL 4 by non-root user

[Alexander Dunlap]

On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 9:02 PM, TJ Takei <tj.takei at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi GHC experts,
>
> As a non-root user of Redhat (amd64) RHEL 4.0 server, I can not use
> rpm. I like to install any relatively recent version of ghc to my
> local installation area just for learning.
> I downloaded first 64-bit binary archive that seems incompatible:
> For example, utils/pwd/pwd does not run.
> So I ended up downloading a src archive...
> % wget http://haskell.org/ghc/dist/6.10.1/ghc-6.10.1-src.tar.bz2
> Then unpack and boot:
> % tar jxvf ghc-6.10.1-src.tar.bz2
> % cd ghc-6.10.1
> % sh boot
>
> So far so good, but the next step "configure" fails... no matter what
> args I give:
> % ./configure --prefix=<my_local_inst_top>
>  configure: error: GHC is required unless bootstrapping from .hc files.
>
> After I edited mk/build.mk to uncomment BuildFlavour=quick, Gnu make fails :
> % make
>  mk/boilerplate.mk:56: mk/config.mk: No such file or directory
>
> Understandably the unknown problem may have started in the configure stage.
> I'm stuck.
> Also I tried ghc-6.8.3-x86-64-unknown-linux.tar.bz2 that yields similar errors.
> Yet another desperate trial of darcs seems no help:
> downloaded...
> wget http://darcs.haskel.org/ghc-STABLE-2008-11-08-ghc-corelibs-testsuite.tar.bz2
> tar jxvf ...
> darcs-all pull -a
> edited mk/build.mk
> sh boot
> ./configure
> then gmake fails.
>
> I would appreciate any help.
> Regards,
> TJ

GHC is written mostly in Haskell, so you need a binary copy of GHC in
order to compile it from source. (This is what the configure error
message meant.) This means you have to get either the binary or the
RPM to work. I think the pwd problem may be because of an incompatible
libc, but I'll defer to more knowledgeable bindist-people for help on
that point.

Alex