ANN: GHC 5.02.1 RPMs including xlib and HGL packages

[Manuel M. T. Chakravarty]

The following might be of special interest to people who are
using Paul Hudak's Haskell textbook for teaching and or
study and would like to run the SOE graphics examples with
GHC - or if you simply want to have an X-based graphics
library for an application.

GHC's source distribution contains the two library packages
`xlib' and `HGL' (Alastair Reid's Haskell Graphics Library)
as part of hslibs, which are not by default built and
installed.  For our local teaching needs at the University
of New South Wales, we have produced a patched version of
GHC 5.02.1 that includes the aforementioned libraries in a
working form.  Haskell modules can be compiled or linked
against these libraries, by providing the command line
options `-package xlib' and `-package HGL', respectively (or
you can specify them using the :s command in the
interpreter).

RPM packages for x86 GNU/Linux based on glibc 2.2 (eg,
RedHat 7.x) containing GHC 5.02.1 including the xlib and HGL
packages are available as

ftp://ftp.cse.unsw.edu.au/pub/users/chak/jibunmaki/i386/ghc-5.02.1-graphics.1.i386.rpm
ftp://ftp.cse.unsw.edu.au/pub/users/chak/jibunmaki/i386/ghc-prof-5.02.1-graphics.1.i386.rpm
ftp://ftp.cse.unsw.edu.au/pub/users/chak/jibunmaki/i386/ghc-doc-5.02.1-graphics.1.i386.rpm

with the source RPM at

  ftp://ftp.cse.unsw.edu.au/pub/users/chak/jibunmaki/src/ghc-5.02.1-graphics.1.src.rpm

The source RPM contains a patched source tar ball and build
instructions in the form of an RPM .spec that may be used to
build the packages for other Linux distributions and on
other Unix systems.  (NB: GreenCard need not be installed to
build this package, as a throw-away version of GreenCard is
included in the tar ball - ie, it is used in the build
process, but not installed.)

Cheers,
Manuel