[Haskell-cafe] Re: Compiling Blobs

[Isaac Dupree]

Peter Verswyvelen wrote:
> However I'm using GHC 6.8.2 on Fedora 8. BTW what do you think is the
> best distro for doing Haskell development?

they all suck if you want to be able to try/use the latest stuff, in my 
experience; just install a GHC and cabal stuff in your home directory 
(you can install more than one GHC-version there if you want to test 
things with multiple versions...).  There's a semi-good reason for this: 
distros don't like to package broken things, and usually something 
breaks with each different version of GHC, but not necessarily something 
you're relying on, and as you're doing Haskell development you may be 
able to help fix it.

so that is, you compile (configure) things with --prefix=$HOME (or 
--prefix=$HOME/unix or so if you don't like your home-directory being 
cluttered with names like "bin", "lib" etc.).  and when using cabal you 
also, if it's a system-wide-installed ghc, need to give --user when 
configuring.  And then you add "whatever-you-put-for-prefix/bin" to your 
path, e.g. in ~/.bashrc adding
PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH"
so that the programs (ghc, happy, alex, xmonad, whatever) will be found 
if you want to run them.

Did I leave anything important out?


now, there might be a distro system that actually worked well for this. 
Maybe in a couple years and once cabal-install is reasonably stable, 
some unconventional distro like GoboLinux or NixOS might meet my 
standards :-)

~Isaac