[Haskell] cannot compile ghc on Debian unstable

[Michael Vanier]

> From: Wolfgang Jeltsch <wolfgang at jeltsch.net>
> Date: Sun, 28 Aug 2005 16:14:26 +0200
> 
> Am Sonntag, 28. August 2005 07:06 schrieb Michael Vanier:
> > Right now, the Debian unstable package for GHC 6.4 won't install due to
> > some conflict with libgmp3 (the package maintainer has been notified).
> 
> But the unstable package works with Debian stable. :-)

And testing, but I'm hoping to avoid that ;-)

> 
> > tried to compile the sources from scratch but found out that GHC requires a
> > previously-existing version of itself to compile.  I have hugs working
> > fine, but configuring using --enable-hc-boot --with-hc=/usr/bin/hugs
> > doesn't work (the configure completes but the compile fails very quickly).
> 
> /usr/bin/hugs is the interactive system.  So to use Hugs, you would have to 
> use /usr/bin/runhugs.  But I'm rather sure that GHC cannot be compiled with 
> Hugs.

Maybe I'll try it, but I think you're probably right.

> 
> > Has anyone managed to get this working?  I'm actually somewhat surprised
> > that there isn't a bootstrap-from-gcc-only mode available like there is in
> > ocaml; what are the issues?
> 
> There C files available which are machine-generated from the Haskell files.  
> You probably have to download a different bundle.

Right, and I could see which files should have generated them, but it
didn't work in that case.  Sounds like a bug -- I'll file a report.

I did finally get GHC working from the binary distributions, and then spent
a couple of happy hours (successfully) recompiling GHC from scratch ;-), so
I'm all set now.  A big thanks to everyone who prepares the binary
distributions (and to the entire GHC team, of course).

Mike