How to install GhC on a Mac without registering?

[Manuel M T Chakravarty]

[Ian, sorry for the duplicate — wrong sender email at first.]

Ian Lynagh:
> On Mon, Jun 06, 2011 at 03:47:57PM +0100, Malcolm Wallace wrote:
>> 
>> On 6 Jun 2011, at 13:49, Lyndon Maydwell wrote:
>> 
>>> I would be fantastic if XCode wasn't a dependency.  ...
>>> 
>>> Not to detract at all from the work of the wonderful GHC and Haskell
>>> Platform contributors in any way. For me it would just make it that
>>> much easier to convince mac-using friends to give Haskell a try.
>> 
>> The ghc team already bundle a copy of gcc in their Windows distribution, precisely because it can be fiddly to get a working copy of gcc for that platform otherwise.  I wonder if they would consider the possibility of shipping gcc on Mac too?  (There may be good reasons not to do that, but let's have the discussion.)
> 
> I'm pretty sure we aren't allowed to redistribute XCode.
> 
> As well as gcc and friends, I think XCode also includes various headers
> and/or libraries that we need.
> 
> If there is an alternative - especially one that allows us to support
> multiple versions of OS X more easily - then using it may make sense.

You are right, the Xcode install includes many tools as well as headers etc.

What would be the advantage of including gcc and all these other things in GHC?  Anybody who is halfway serious about developing software on a Mac will have Xcode installed anyway.  Besides, as Xcode updates are now available from the Mac App Store, you don't even need to register as a developer with Apple anymore — yes, you need to pay the nominal $5 for the 4GB download.  If you don't want to do that, install the (probably older) version of Xcode that came with the install DVDs of your Mac.

I don't think you can compare this with the situation on Windows.  Microsoft does not distribute a canonical set of Unix tools that all developers use.

Manuel