zlib and dependencies in general

[Don Stewart]

iainspeed:
> 
> 2009/6/30 Don Stewart <dons at galois.com>
> 
> 
>     The cabal file lists zlib as a dependency:
> 
>            extra-libraries: z
> 
>     however, what 'z' means varies from distro to distro. Ultimately, your
>     package manager has to solve this.
> 
>     -- Don
> 
> 
> Thanks for the reply, but I see two problems with this
> 
> 1. cabal-install depends on zlib, so the .cabal file is not a help in this
> case.
> 
> 2. Even if I did know that cabal-install was the usual package manager (saw one
> person today on Haskell Cafe that didn't) and thought to look in the .cabal
> file, then  "extra-libraries: z" still wouldn't have helped me, as a human,
> know to install zlibc, zlib1g and zlib1g-dev.
> 
> 3) one for luck, Debian doesn't have a package for cabal-install or the haskell
> zlib library, so it can't solve this for me either. Unless it can use .cabal
> files, and why would I know this and what would the commands be?
> 
> I had to completely remove Cabal and GHC and then spend 2 days resolving
> dependencies to get it working with the latest versions on OSX Tiger as well,
> so it's not as if this is a one off problem, unless I'm the problem. Therefore
> I think some human readable text on Hackage would be helpful.

Perhaps the Haskell Platform would be helpful here to get you
bootstrapped?

    http://hackage.haskell.org/platform/

Pre-built binaries for the main toolchain for a good number of systems.

-- Don