So here I am on a Sunday morning, wondering whether I should install GHC on my laptop. After some reading, I find that they recommend using MacPorts on a Mac. But I’ve noticed a long time ago that my ports installation was messed up, and when I go to their website now, it says “targetting mainly the current Mac OS X release (10.5, A.K.A Leopard) and the immediately previous one (10.4, A.K.A. Tiger).” No Panther.
When I check building from source, it says that building “needs an installed GHC (version 6.4.2 at least). If your platform isn’t currently supported with a binary distribution, then you’ll need to consult the section on Porting GHC in the Building Guide.” And that in turn requires me to get “the intermediate C files (known as HC files) from another GHC compilation, compiling them using gcc to get a working GHC.”
Yikes.
Looking through the older releases available I found the last release supporting Panther to be 6.4.1 ¹ – I’ll give it a try.
Alpinobombus:~ alex$ ghc --version The Glorious Glasgow Haskell Compilation System, version 6.4.1
That worked. So now I’m trying to build GHC 6.10.1. I’m not sure that’s really worth it, but who knows.
First problem:
`mk/config.mk:31: *** GNU make version 3.79.1 or later is required.. Stop.`
Wow! I have 3.79 instead of 3.79.1 – so close! Building 3.81, now.
Ok, so compiling 6.10 didn’t work. I decided to try to follow the build chain and build 6.6 inlcuding all the extras using 6.4. If that works, I’ll try and build 6.8 using 6.6, and finally 6.10 using 6.8.
Current status: Built and installed 6.6, tried to compile both 6.8.3 and 6.10.1 and failed. Oh well, I guess this will do for now. 😄
Time to work through some Real World Haskell
#Software #Haskell