build question: ghc 6.11.20090605 -> ghc 6.10.3?

Ian Lynagh igloo at earth.li
Fri Jun 19 16:31:05 EDT 2009


Hi Uwe,

Sorry for the slow response.

On Sun, Jun 07, 2009 at 03:04:44PM -0700, Uwe Hollerbach wrote:
> Hi, all, is it expected that a snapshot version (I'm using 2009.06.05)
> should be able to build the released version 6.10.3?

No: In order to compile the 6.10.3 release you need to use a released
version of GHC between version 6.6 and version 6.10.3 (inclusive).

> This weekend I
> tried the "porting to an unsupported machine" procedure with the
> aforementioned snapshot version; that worked, after some fussing, and
> I seem to have a working ghc install, including several libraries and
> cabal.

Great!

> But I tried building the Haskell Platform, and it warns
> (rightly, as it turns out) about this being an unsupported version of
> ghc. So I'd like to get onto the regular release train, as it were,
> and transfer myself to ghc 6.10.3.

In order to do this, you'd have to get your hands dirty. The 6.10.3
source didn't know what differences there would be in your snapshot, so
it doesn't have any support for them. You'd need to add this support to
the 6.10.3 build system.

If you've got cabal-install working then you can just cabal-install the
libraries that you want, of course. You may have problems with some of
them not working due to the changes in your snapshot, though.

When 6.12.1 is released you might be able to compile it with your
snapshot, but that isn't guaranteed. It's likely to be easier than
building 6.10.3 would be, though. If nothing else, the porting procedure
will work for 6.12.1.

> PS I suppose I should describe in a little bit of detail what I did
> for the porting, might be useful for someone else trying this. It was
> a rather vanilla port, x86_64-unknown-linux to same; my target machine
> is my workstation at work, where I don't have root, and I do have
> permission from IT to install this stuff, but no support... so they
> won't install rpms for me, or anything like that. It's also a slightly
> old and somewhat customized version of some RedHat corporate release,
> so recent plain-vanilla tarballs didn't work... hence the need to
> port.

Another possibility would be to go back to the tarball of an earlier
version of GHC, and then to use that to compile the newer version.

> The third issue was the sed syntax on the same page: the version of
> sed that I was using didn't like the space between the "-i" and the
> ".bak". I don't know if that's a variation from one version of sed to
> another, or a typo on the page, or??? Again no big deal, the error
> message from sed was informative enough for me to figure out what to
> do.

I've removed the space, thanks.


Thanks
Ian



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