[Haskell-cafe] Re: a help for install

[Ben Franksen]

Wolfgang Jeltsch wrote:
> Am Montag, 18. Februar 2008 19:46 schrieb Carlos Gomez A.:
>> hi, my name is carlos
>>
>> I need information for correct install    or
>>
>> what are dependencies on ghc ?
>>
>> I have a Debian System.
> 
> Always use your distribution’s packages until they aren’t any or there is
> good
> reason not to do so.  Try “aptitude install ghc6”.

For my system (kubuntu 7.10) ghc-6.8.2 is not available as a package, only
6.6.1. And there are programs and libraries that can't be used with 6.6.1.

Furthermore, in kubuntu 7.10 the libghc6 packages are broken w.r.t the
documentation path. To illustrate (I have both libghc6-mtl-dev and
libghc6-mtl-doc installed):

ben at sarun[1]: ~ > ghc-pkg describe mtl | grep haddock
haddock-interfaces: /usr/share/mtl-1.0.1/doc/html/mtl.haddock
haddock-html: /usr/share/mtl-1.0.1/doc/html
ben at sarun[1]: ~ > ls /usr/share/mtl-1.0.1/doc/html
ls: /usr/share/mtl-1.0.1/doc/html: No such file or directory

ben at sarun[1]: ~ > locate mtl.haddock
/usr/share/doc/ghc6-doc/html/libraries/mtl/mtl.haddock
ben at sarun[1]: ~ > ls /usr/share/doc/ghc6-doc/html/libraries/mtl/mtl.haddock
/usr/share/doc/ghc6-doc/html/libraries/mtl/mtl.haddock

This leads to errors when haddock tries to link to the mtl documentation. It
took me quite a while to figure out what the source of this problem was.

IME, it is better to install ghc and all the libraries from source. Of
course you need to install ghc from the distro package for bootstrapping
ghc, but you can delete it after the self-compiled ghc is installed.

Cheers
Ben

PS: Yes, I reported this bug to the package maintainer but I received no
response.