Linux deployment requirements for GHC-produced binaries

[Yitzchak Gale]

> You may need to resort to
> strace to find out what's trying to pull in libgmp.so.whatever.

I don't know how to do that. And anyway, I don't have access to
the machine on which the customer is reporting this. I do believe
the report - there is no compilation going on here, they are
only running our GHC-compiled binary. They know nothing
about GHC (not even that we are using it).

I was hoping that there would be some general knowledge about
this so I could just pass it on to our customers. But I see everyone
else is as surprised as I am about a supposedly static GHC-compiled
binary requiring a libgmp.so to run.

> Unless this
> program is like xmonad and requires ghc behind the scenes to build
> something, in which case you would indeed need everything that ghc requires
> (and, of course, ghc itself).

No definitely not.

Erik de Castro Lopo wrote:
>>> I suspect the OP's exectuable is already being compiled static.

I compiled it static.

Brandon Allbery wrote:
>> Yes; which leaves the question of why it requires libgmp.so, and if it's
>> static the only things I can think of are (a) it's using dlopen(), or (b)
>> it's running something else that is not static and requires libgmp.so.

Right.

Could a dependent library be causing this? For example, this
program depends on direct-sqlite, which in turn links to
sqlite via FFI. It also depends on wai, which pulls in quite a few
indirect dependencies.

If so - how would I investigate this and get a complete list of
the system libraries that customers are required to install
as prerequisites?

Jens Petersen wrote:
> You built ghc yourself?

No. It is the generic Linux binary tarball from GHC HQ.

> And ran ldd on $bindir/ghc or  $libdir/ghc-version ?

No, in $bindir that's just a shell script. It's in $libdir.
The executable is ghc; ghc-version is a directory containing
object files compiled from libraries.

Thanks,
Yitz