zlib and dependencies in general

[Don Stewart]

iainspeed:
> 
> 2009/6/30 Don Stewart <dons at galois.com>
> 
> 
>     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
> 
> 
> Thanks for the link.
> 
> Unfortunately, the OSX only works for Leopard, and I initially used the Debian
> package for GHC (6.8.2) and Hugs but no cabal-install in there, and then used 
> source to get GHC6.8.3. I still can't get cabal-install on.


The 'unix' source package will bootstrap Haskell for you on OS X (the
nice binary installer though is indeed Leopard only).

  
> I think the main point though is that Cabal and cabal-install are not
> straightforward to install (I must be pretty close to trying all versions by
> now), and the packages they require aren't always straight forward to install,
> which is why I think more, human readable, dependency information could be
> shown on Hackage.


Yes, definitely. Making it trivial to get a complete toolchain is the
job of the Haskell Platform, too.

  
> I'm already sold on using Haskell so I'm persevering, but I think anyone who
> was just interested and had this trouble would have given up long ago, and
> likely you wouldn't have heard from them.

Well, cabal-install requires some bootstrapping, hence the platform to
make that easier.

-- Don