[Haskell-cafe] Re: Installing Haskell on Windows 7

[Thomas Hühn]

Hi

Duncan Coutts <duncan.coutts at googlemail.com> writes:

> Except for haddock, none of these packages come with the Haskell
> Platform. These are packages that you must have installed previously. So
> ghc-pkg check is quite right to report them.

Okay, right.

>> Okay, reinstalling them all (with --user --reinstall").
>> 
>> Except haddock:
>> 
>> C:\Users\Thomas>cabal install haddock --user --reinstall
>> Resolving dependencies...
>> cabal: cannot configure haddock-2.6.0. It requires ghc >=6.12 && <6.14
>> There is no available version of ghc that satisfies >=6.12 && <6.14
>
> Right, try installing the same version as you've got currently rather
> than the latest version.
>
> In an ideal world the cabal-install package dependency resolver would
> work out that the latest version cannot be installed (since it needs a
> later ghc) and fall back to the next version that can work. However at
> the moment it is not quite that smart. Use:
>
> cabal install haddock-2.4.2

"cabal install haddock-2.4.2 --user --reinstall" ends with:
Linking dist\build\haddock\haddock.exe ...
cabal: Error: some packages failed to install:
haddock-2.4.2 failed during the final install step. The exception was:
CreateDirectory: permission denied (Zugriff verweigert)

> You can edit this config file. I suggest you change it to use per-user
> installs by default. Set "user-install: True" (and make sure you
> uncomment the line, the "--" prefix).

That doesn't work at all. As soon as I uncomment that line and set it
to True, I get:

cabal: C:\Users\Thomas\AppData\Roaming\cabal\packages
user-install: True\hackage.haskell.org\00-index.tar: openBinaryFile: invalid arg
ument (Invalid argument)

>> But then again I shouldn't have to meddle with some installed
>> configuration file,
>
> These defaults worked ok for Windows XP but they're clearly no good for
> Vista and Win7. Just change the default to per-user installs.
>
>> especially since there has been no warning that I had to do that and
>> very especially since I entered my destination folder upon
>> installation. Maybe it's okay, but it kind of makes me nervous. And
>> God knows what else I haven't stumbled upon yet.
>
> Where you install the Haskell Platform is independent of these settings.
> You would not want to install other packages into the same location as
> the platform and there's no particular reason to suppose that you would
> have the file permissions to do so.

Not in the Platform directory itself, but I'd like to group bigger
chunks like "everything Haskell" in a common directory (with
subdirectories "Platform", "Local-Cabal", "whatever"), just as I put
TeX Live into its own directory, right under the root directory. Makes
PATHs shorter, as well.

> No, it's reasonable to expect the defaults to work. Sadly they do not at
> the moment for Windows 7. Change it to use per-user installs by default
> and let us know how that goes.

No luck with haddoch, so far, and hakyll (which sounded cool and I
wanted to try out) doesn't work, either:

Linking dist\build\markdown2pdf\markdown2pdf.exe ...
Created man\man1\pandoc.1
Created man\man1\hsmarkdown.1
Created man\man1\html2markdown.1
Created man\man1\markdown2pdf.1
setup.exe: CreateDirectory: permission denied (Zugriff verweigert)
cabal: Error: some packages failed to install:
hakyll-0.2 depends on pandoc-1.3 which failed to install.
pandoc-1.3 failed during the final install step. The exception was:
exit: ExitFailure 1

As I said before, I don't have a clue, where cabal wants to install
what. Some error messages beyond "failed" would have been nice. Like
"creating directory XYZ failed".

BTW, I just retried installing everything manually (GHC 6.12.1) and I
almost got there, but the network package doesn't install. Probably
because I don't have a full mingw installation, only what came with
GHC. Lots of headers missing and other compilation
problems. configure.sh probably didn't run, as well.

Is there no way to get binary objects from hackage, for the C parts at
least, so that GHC can just link the Haskell parts against it?

Thomas