[Haskell-cafe] platform/cabal problems

[Duncan Coutts]

On Wed, 2009-05-27 at 22:43 +0200, Johannes Waldmann wrote:
> Hi all.
> 
> I've written some Haskell program,
> and I wanted to give it to a friend, in source form,
> so he can run and modify it, and learn some Haskell
> while doing so. I was using some cabalized extra packages
> but hey, this looks like the typical use case for the haskell-platform.
> So: I told him to install the newest stable ghc
> and the current platform release and this happens:
> 
> la:/home/b/appl.linux/haskell-platform-2009.2.0# ./configure
> ...
> checking for hsc2hs... /usr/local/bin/hsc2hs
> checking version of ghc... 6.10.3
> checking version of ghc-pkg matches... yes
> checking ghc actually works... yes
> checking the ghc core packages are all installed... no
> configure: error: The core package editline-0.2.1.0 is missing.
>   It should have been distributed with 6.10.2
>                       ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

When we released 2009.2.0, ghc-6.10.3 had not been released yet. I had
hoped that the source based installer would work with 6.10.3, but we
forgot that 6.10.3 was removing a package that had shipped with 6.10.2,
hence the error you see.

You can hack the list of expected packages or use
--enable-unsupported-ghc-version or wait 'til the release next week of
2009.2.0.1 which will use ghc 6.10.3.

> What's the particular reason for the failure?
> editline was distributed with ghc-6.10.2, but not with 6.10.3?
> I wouldn't expect an incompatible change
> when (only) the patchlevel is bumped.

It's a bit unfortunate. The way we're coping with it in 2009.2.0.1 is
that we supply editline.

> The platform web site should probably replace
> "works with ghc-6.10.x" by "works with ghc-6.10.2 only".

Yes.

Duncan