[GHC] #7375: Building ghc fails because it is looking for an old version of libgmp

[GHC]

#7375: Building ghc fails because it is looking for an old version of libgmp
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  Reporter:  mimosa               |          Owner:                  
      Type:  bug                  |         Status:  closed          
  Priority:  normal               |      Milestone:                  
 Component:  Compiler             |        Version:  7.4.2           
Resolution:  fixed                |       Keywords:                  
        Os:  Linux                |   Architecture:  Unknown/Multiple
   Failure:  Building GHC failed  |     Difficulty:  Unknown         
  Testcase:                       |      Blockedby:                  
  Blocking:                       |        Related:  5743            
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Comment(by mimosa):

 Thanks for your response, simonmar. I wasn't clear enough in my original
 report (though I did add a comment). I am packaging ghc for Salix (which
 is backwards-compatible with Slackware). There is currently no package for
 Slackware or as far as I know for any other Slackware-based distro.

 My reason for not packaging the latest ghc (which doesn't have the gmp
 problem, though it does have a similar problem with libffi, see #5743) is
 because an older ghc seems to be needed for haskell-platform, and in
 particular for xmonad.

 The nearest thing to a package for Slackware itself is the SlackBuild
 linked to on this website alongside packages for other distros. But that
 isn't a package, it's just a build script - and it doesn't resolve the
 problem with gmp.

 For the typical user who might want to install xmonad, or haskell-
 platform, this situation means an ugly hack is needed. The problem has
 come up repeatedly on the Salix forums. Such a hack isn't acceptable in a
 package.

 Since my original report here, I've managed to get the offending gmp to
 build. Here are links to my packages for i486 and x86_64, and the
 SLKBUILD:
 http://people.salixos.org/mimosa/packages/ghc/7.4.2/ghc-7.4.2-i486-1tjb.txz
 http://people.salixos.org/mimosa/packages/ghc/7.4.2/ghc-7.4.2-x86_64-1tjb.txz
 http://people.salixos.org/mimosa/packages/ghc/7.4.2/SLKBUILD
 However, even that way of doing it is pretty hackish. With regard to the
 libffi problem (which my build also resolves in the same way), SUSE for
 instance has a package with a patch - see #5743.

 Or is there something I should be passing to configure to tell it to use
 the system library? As you say:

 {{{
 your distro, which will have a GHC correctly built for whatever is the
 right GMP version on your system
 }}}

 As it stands, configure just complains about the absence of libgmp.so.3. I
 looked into this in an older version of Ubuntu (10.10), and the solution
 there was to make ghc depend on a special package gmp-4.3-dev (or whatever
 the number is). That's basically the same as my approach, except it splits
 off the "magic library" into a separate package.

 My impression is that the truly correct way to solve this is to patch the
 ghc source to use system libraries when it builds. But that's far from
 straightforward, and not a desirable situation.

-- 
Ticket URL: <http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/7375#comment:3>
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