The latest version of the Haskell Platform is Haskell Platform
2010.2.0.0.
However, even with the latest version,
cabal install cabal-install
installs cabal in the wrong place (not in extralibs/bin) under Windows
at least so it is impossible to upgrade cabal.
Having said that perhaps it is for the best as I have had bad
experiences upgrading bits of the Haskell Platform.
It is probably safer just to be satisfied with whatever comes with the
latest version of the Platform and wait patiently for the next
release.
Kevin
On Aug 16, 9:27 pm, Andrew Coppin andrewcop...@btinternet.com wrote:
And so today, just for giggles, I tried to get Sifflet to work. Along
the way, I encountered a number of... glitches, if you will.
First of all, I tried to get it to work on Windows. I fired up a new
Windows VM and installed Haskell Platform 2010.1.0.0. It seems that
(finally) this includes the cabal-install tool, which is nice. It seems
it includes cabal-install 0.8.0, so as soon as I tried cabal update,
it tells me a new version is available. It claims I just need to cabal
install cabal-install (which is amusingly riddle-like). Unfortunately,
although doing this *does work*, the new cabal.exe is installed lower
down the search path than the existing one, so you still get the old
version (unless you manually fiddle with the search path). In fact, it
seems that the HP install folder is higher up the search path than the
global binary target, which is higher than the local binary target.
It seems to me like this ought to be the other way around.
The next problem is that cabal install sifflet gets mighty confused
and outright fails. Basically it can't figure out how to resolve all the
dependencies. It seems that Sifflet demands GTK 0.11.0 (i.e.,
gtk-0.11.0, pango-0.11.0, glib-0.11.0, etc.) However, Cabal looks at
gtk-0.11.0, sees it depends on (say) glib-0.11.*, and wants to use
glib-0.11.1 (the latest one). But then Sifflet wants glib-0.11.0, not
glib-0.11.1, and it seems Cabal just can't figure out what the heck to
do. Which is slightly surprising, really.
The solution (of sorts) is to painstakingly resolve the dependencies by
hand, by asking Cabal to install the correct packages one at a time in
the correct order. (I still love the way Gtk2hs *actually compiles* on
Windows now. That's pretty sweet!)
That reminds me. What the heck is actually *in* file 126? I don't know
why, but compiling file 126 (Graphics.UI.Gtk.Gdk.Cursor) takes up 75% of
the entire Gtk2hs build time! What's that all about?
Anyway, having finally built Gtk2hs version 0.11.0 successfully, I
continued trying to get Sifflet working... only to discover it wants the
curl package. And when I ask Cabal to build it, it just retorts that
it has a configure script. *sigh* So that's the end of that. I have
absolutely no idea why a tool like Sifflet would need access to the Curl
library. Presumably this is just another one of those obscure
dependency-chasing artifacts that happen from time to time? (After
dealing with Linux, I'm used to this kind of weirdness.)
OK, so it's only possible to run Sifflet under Linux. Let's give that a
try...
So I fire up a new OpenSUSE VM. I quickly discovered that gtk seems to
want Alex and Happy, but cabal-install is defaulting to doing a local
rather than global install, and thereafter it can't find Alex or
Happy, even though they're installed. (Yeah, great, thanks for that...)
So I rewind the VM, build the latest version of cabal-install, and edit
the configuration to do global installs instead of local. The amusing
part is, if you sudo cabal install so it has permission to put the
installed files into place, it then uses root's configuration file
instead. *sigh* Well anyway, I managed to work around that. But... Cabal
*still* fails to find Alex or Happy, even though they're now in the
search path.
Oh, wait. They're in *my* search path. They're not in root's search
path. (As per good security practise, root's search path is rather
short.) I can pass some CLI switches to tell it where these are, but
then gtk2hs-buildtools makes a whole bunch of stuff which Cabal also
can't find. Eventually, the easiest thing I could come up with was to do
cabal unpack to get a source tree, configure and build as me, and sudo
for the install. Except that then it tries to reconfigure...? Wuh? So
instead of sudo cabal install, I tried sudo runhaskell Setup
install, which works just fine (although obviously it's rather wordy!)
So, I manually hold Cabal's hand through the process of building all the
0.11.0 packages one at a time, in a way that it can find all the stuff
at configure-time. Gosh this is a faff! Well anyway, it worked. Trips
over when I reach Curl, but that's because I need to ask YaST to install
the curl-devel package. And, finally, I can build and install Sifflet
itself.
After 4 hours or so of typing commands, it was nice to do some stuff
with my mouse. ;-)
