[Haskell-cafe] GHC 7, Platform 2011.2 vs OS X 10.5, Ubuntu 11.04

[Anthony Cowley]

On Mon, May 23, 2011 at 5:17 AM, Jacek Generowicz
<jacek.generowicz at cern.ch> wrote:
> So, after this tale of agony, here are two concrete questions:
>
> a) Am I right in concluding that GHC 7.0.3 will not run on OS X 10.5
> (without unreasonable effort)?

This is a frustrating situation. Note that there is a binary for 7.0.1
that supports 10.5
<http://www.haskell.org/ghc/download_ghc_7_0_1#macosxintel>. From
this, you should be able to build 7.0.3 yourself. One minor note: if
you're interested in LLVM, stick to the 32-bit build.! If you
encounter problems, #haskell will help.

As for the platform, if it is giving you trouble, don't shy away from
just using GHC and cabal as normal! After you've cabal installed a few
big packages, you will find that you've acquired many of the most
popular packages.

> b) On Ubuntu Natty I installed the generic linux GHC 7.0.3 binary.
> Downloaded Haskell Platform 2011.2.0.1 source distribution. ./configure
> worked happily. make fails as follows.
>
> Building transformers-0.2.2.0
> "/usr/local/haskell-platform-2011.2.0.1/bin/ghc" "--make" "Setup" "-o"
> "Setup" "-package" "Cabal-1.10.1.0"
> <command line>: cannot satisfy -package Cabal-1.10.1.0:
>    Cabal-1.10.1.0-1fb2094e19492373b1a39284193e7984 is unusable due to
> missing or recursive dependencies:
>      process-1.0.1.5-55dfaccf3a91c4cb8f6284a0bafef198


The Ubuntu HP story is a bit of a gotcha for the innocent user, too.
But, again, you can happily install GHC 7.0.3, and then cabal install
your way to happiness. The problem you encountered seems due to a
conflict among packages that came with GHC.

I think your strategy of nuking everything Haskell through your
package manager (if available), then manually (not forgetting ~/.ghc
and ~/.cabal) was prudent to get out of the hole you found yourself
in. But don't let HP installation troubles keep you away from Haskell
altogether!

Anthony