[Haskell-cafe] Compiling GHC on Scientific Linux V5 [http://ftp.scientificlinux.org/linux/scientific/50/iso/i386/SL-5.0-050407-i386-DVD.iso, Build on RHEL5]

[Animesh Sharma]

For a long time I wanted to go 'strictly functional' and what better way
then to start with the beast, ghc. So about a couple of months back, I
downloaded version 6.6.1 [
http://www.haskell.org/ghc/dist/6.6.1/rpm/rhel5/i386/ghc661-6.6.1-2.el5.i386.rpm]
and started reading YAHT [
http://darcs.haskell.org/yaht/yaht.pdf ]. Then the 'laziness' took over and
my 'idea of being strictly functional' took a back-seat. The news of release
of ghc Version 6.8.1 (3 November 2007) reignited the desire. This time I
thought of compiling the ghc from source [ Main -
http://www.haskell.org/ghc/dist/6.8.1/ghc-6.8.1-src.tar.bz2
, Extra Libs -
http://www.haskell.org/ghc/dist/6.8.1/ghc-6.8.1-src-extralibs.tar.bz2 ].
Make sure you have 4-5 hours and 1-1.5 GB of disc space!
Become 'root' and extract the above two files:
tar xvjf ghc-6.8.1-src.tar.bz2
tar xvjf ghc-6.8.1-src-extralibs.tar.bz2
Both of them will extract in the directory ./ghc-6.8.1.
For compiling there are some dependencies to be taken care of:
1. ghc [I already had v 6.6.1,
http://www.haskell.org/ghc/dist/6.6.1/rpm/rhel5/i386/ghc661-6.6.1-2.el5.i386.rpm]
, it is interesting as the compilers compiles its next version [
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_(compilers) ]:
rpm -ivhf ghc661-6.6.1-2.el5.i386.rpm
2. cabal, Common Architecture for Building Applications and Libraries, which
can be downloaded from
http://www.haskell.org/cabal/release/rc/cabal-1.2.2.0.tar.gz and
installation instructions need to be followed [
http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Cabal/How_to_install_a_Cabal_package ]:
tar xzf cabal-1.2.2.0.tar.gz
cd cabal-1.2.2
runhaskell Setup.hs configure
runhaskell Setup.hs build
runhaskell Setup.hs install
3. readline-devel, readline library which in turn has terminfo as
dependence, so better to use yum for installation:
yum install readline-devel
4. alex, A lexical analyser generator for Haskell, whose rpm can be
downloaded from
http://www.haskell.org/alex/dist/2.1.0/RH9/alex-2.1.0-1.i386.rpm and
installed easily:
rpm -ivhf alex-2.1.0-1.i386.rpm
5. happy, the yacc of haskell [I read on http://tritium.livejournal.com/ to
compile happy you need old version of happy]. But for me simply getting the
source http://www.haskell.org/happy/dist/1.17/happy-1.17.tar.gz and
installation worked fine:
tar xvzf happy-1.17-html.tar.gz
cd happy-1.17
runhaskell Setup.hs configure
runhaskell Setup.hs build
runhaskell Setup.hs install

We are all set for the ghc compilation:
cd ghc-6.8.1
./configure
make
make install

Clean up ~300MB from the older ghc (v 6.6.1) installation, I went the brute
force way:
find /usr -name ghc-6.6.1 > <list>
rm -rf <list>

Now I have to dig deeper into the release note
(http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/6.8.1/html/users_guide/release-6-8-1.html
), one thing which has really got me interested is the introduction of
debugger to GHCi. Any tutorials on how to go about it?

Regards,

Ani



---------The Answer lies in the Genome------------
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