[Haskell-cafe] Re: Poor first impression

[Simon Marlow]

ls-haskell-developer-2006 at m-e-leypold.de wrote:
>> 5) The "gigantic README" with it's "obscure note" is here
>> http://www.haskell.org/ghc/download_ghc_661.html a few lines away from
>> the download link.  You can probably read it in the time it takes you
>> to find and click the download link.  Much quicker than waiting for a
>> configure script to detect the problem.
> 
> Also, just in case one doesn't know where to look, doing a web search
> for 'ghc "libreadline.so.4"' gives enough hits to solve the
> problem. The OP insisisted on compiling from the source (which is OK),

Just wanted to clear up a misconception I've seen several times in this thread: 
the OP was *not* building from source, he was installing from a binary 
distribution tarball.  The confusion no doubt arises because our binary tarball 
has a configure script and a Makefile.  The real build system *does* check for 
readline, as it should.

The tarball is built on an old RedHat 9 system with readline 4 on it.  The main 
reasons we supply the binary tarball (as opposed to distro packages) are so that 
you can install GHC in your home directory, or install multiple versions of GHC, 
or try out new releases without installing them system-wide.  I'm going to 
upgrade the machine that builds these distributions at some point, but it's in 
the data center and I find it a bit cold and windy in there :-)

Typically the best way to get GHC on Linux is directly from your distro.  The 
download page for 6.6.1 is currently not particularly helpful, we will be 
improving it in due course.

Cheers,
	Simon