Bugs item #1115805, was opened at 2005-02-03 22:19 Message generated for change (Comment added) made by simonmar You can respond by visiting: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=108032&aid=1115805&group_id=8032
Category: Build System Group: None >Status: Closed Resolution: None Priority: 5 Submitted By: Titus Brown (titus) Assigned to: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody) Summary: ghc-6.2.2 requires special configure flag... Initial Comment: To build from the source at http://www.haskell.org/ghc/download_ghc_622.html you need to add the --disable-hc-boot command to 'configure'. This isn't mentioned anywhere in the docs, and certainly isn't the default config ;). thanks, --titus (on Linux, no previous GHC install) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- >Comment By: Simon Marlow (simonmar) Date: 2005-02-07 10:59 Message: Logged In: YES user_id=48280 First, a bit of background philosophy: GHC is a Haskell compiler, written in Haskell. That means you need a Haskell compiler (GHC in particular) to compile it. Just like in order to compile gcc, you need a C compiler to start with. When you say "from scratch", you really mean "from C sources", which is quite an arbitrary choice. Now, to practical matters: To partly contradict what I just said, it is possible to compile GHC with just a C compiler, because GHC can generate C code. We use this technique for bootstrapping on new systems. It's not easy, it's only moderatly well-supported, and we don't recommend it if you just want to compile up GHC. On FreeBSD, the port begins by downloading a small bootstrapping distribution of GHC, and uses that to build the sources. Your point about documentation is well taken. I'll see what I can do to make this information easier to find. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Comment By: Titus Brown (titus) Date: 2005-02-04 17:10 Message: Logged In: YES user_id=23486 Without that flag, configure fails on not finding ghc. As it turns out, *with* the --disable flag compilation fails if you don't have ghc. So I don't understand how to download the ghc sources and compile it if you don't already have ghc. The documentation was silent on this point ;). I ended up installing an old RedHat RPM, compiling ghc, and then removing the RPM. So I'd recommend either describing how to compile ghc *from scratch* -- it's gotta be possible, right!? -- and linking that into the docs near the beginning, or stating bluntly that it's not easy and neophytes should just use a package! (FWIW, I installed under FreeBSD using ports and Debian using apt-get w/o a problem.) Sorry to be a pain, and apologies if I missed something somewhere - but I did spend about 30 minutes looking through the documentation & couldn't figure out how to take the ghc-6.2.2 download and build it from scratch. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Comment By: Simon Marlow (simonmar) Date: 2005-02-04 13:46 Message: Logged In: YES user_id=48280 The --disable-hc-boot option should not be required. What goes wrong if you don't have it? Also, you need GHC installed in order to build the sources. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can respond by visiting: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=108032&aid=1115805&group_id=8032 _______________________________________________ Glasgow-haskell-bugs mailing list [email protected] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-bugs
