building GHC for Slackware/Salix

[Tim Beech]

I've now tried a build strictly according to the instructions, which
is to say, I installed the binary distribution, then haskell-platform
on top of it, before building GHC from source. I get the same errors,
plus a few more (I did the quick build rather than the fully optimized
default build, so maybe that's why; most of the extra failures are
from perf/compiler and say "stat not good enough").
Out of curiosity, I unpacked the bindist tarball afresh and ran the
failed tests on it. They also failed (the third one in a few more
ways):

Unexpected failures:
   lib/Time  T5430 [bad stdout]
(normal,hpc,optasm,profasm,threaded1,threaded2,dyn,profthreaded)
   lib/Time  T5430 [bad stdout or stderr] (ghci)

All this makes me think there is something wrong with my setup. I'd be
very grateful if anyone has any suggestions - or if this is the wrong
place for these questions, where would be a better place.

Tim


On 09/12/2012, tim.beech <tim.beech at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm making a GHC package for Salix 14 (which is backwards-compatible with
> Slackware, so this will be a Slackware package, too).
>
> The main thing I'd be grateful for advice on is the overall approach I'm
> taking to the package. Others I've seen (such as the Arch package) just
> assume GHC is already present.
>
> My build script unpacks the binary distribution for "unknown linux" and
> builds GHC against that. (Both are version 7.4.2.) I have avoided
> installing anything else (such as the Haskell Platform) so as to keep as
> close as possible to the ideal of a package as a transparent,
> reproducible process that only depends on the source. As far as I can
> tell from the build prerequisites
>
> http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Building/Preparation/Tools
>
> the only consequence is that documentation is only created as html, not
> pdf and ps as well.
>
> Though everything seems to work ok, the build as it stands fails three
> tests:
>
> Unexpected failures:
> lib/Time T5430 [bad stdout] (normal)
> perf/compiler parsing001 [stat not good enough] (normal)
> simplCore/should_compile spec-inline [stderr mismatch] (optasm)
>
> That is after running the fast version of the test suite, which the
> documentation says should pass 100%.
>
> My second question is, do these results suggest anything as to where the
> problem may lie, and how important it is?
>
> When I then installed the new package and built the Haskell Platform
> against it (using the build script at http://slackbuilds.org), although
> the installation nonetheless appeared to be succesful, the build script
> failed at the very end where it tries to do
>
> ghc-pkg recache
>
> When I did this manually, I discovered root permissions were needed. Is
> that normal?
>