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

[Daniel Fischer]

On Monday 23 May 2011 14:16:43, Jacek Generowicz wrote:
> 
> > From this, you should be able to build 7.0.3 yourself.
> 
> That's interesting. I won't try that *right* now.
> 

It's easy, assuming you have installed alex and happy (and preferably 
hscolour), just download and unpack the source bundle,

$ ./configure --prefix=wherever

If it says it's going to build pdf and ps docs, that may fail if you have 
the wrong version of dblatex.

$ make && make install

Go play a football match or something, that takes a while.

> > 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.

With what error?
Downloading and unpacking the .tar.gz bundle and then running

$ ./bootstrap.sh

in that directory should work.

> Or do you mean "manual install" of Cabal packages?

That's not very comfortable, since you have to chase dependencies manually.
Spending some effort to get cabal-install installed is definitely worth it.


> 
> 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?
> 

Probably some package.conf.d survived the purge and was picked up by the 
fresh ghc. If you've deleted ~/.ghc, that would be in /usr/xxx. If you dare 
not messing around there, you could install ghc under $HOME, that shouldn't 
pick it up then.