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

[Jacek Generowicz]

On 2011 May 23, at 13:45, Anthony Cowley wrote:

> On Mon, May 23, 2011 at 5:17 AM, Jacek Generowicz
> <jacek.generowicz at cern.ch> wrote:
>> 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>.

OK, that was painless. Thanks!

> From this, you should be able to build 7.0.3 yourself.

That's interesting. I won't try that *right* now.

> 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.

If by "cabal install" you mean use the command "cabal" ... yeah, that  
would be great, if only I could install cabal-install, which fails. Or  
do you mean "manual install" of Cabal packages? Either way, I'm not  
making much progress.

>
>> 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.

Maybe if I managed to install just one package manually, then I might  
start sharing some of you optimism :-)

> The problem you encountered seems due to a
> conflict among packages that came with GHC.

Which does seem rather odd, doesn't it? I'm tempted to think that I  
didn't quite manage to nuke everything, because I find it hard to  
believe that GHC itself comes with internal conflicts which The Google  
seems not to have heard about.

> 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.

Yup,  ~/.ghc and ~/.cabal didn't escape my attention.

Except that it doesn't seem to have worked (yet - hope springs eternal).

When I ghc-pkg check, I get lots of complaints about ~/.cabal/lib/ 
somelibrary/ghc-7.0.3 not being found. Erm, I nuked it all and then  
installed ghc-7.0.3 from scratch (generic Linux binary package), so  
I've no idea *why* my system thinks that these should exist unless  
*it* put them there after the purge during the installation of ghc.

Any ideas how to solve this?

> But don't let HP installation troubles keep you away from Haskell
> altogether!

I'm determined not to let that happen, but when the few precious  
moments I can afford to spend on Haskell end up being spent on  
installation troubles rather than Haskell itself, then it does become  
rather tough to keep the motivation.