binary installations installation, of binaries Installing from binary distributions is easiest, and recommended! (Why binaries? Because GHC is a Haskell compiler written in Haskell, so you've got to bootstrap it somehow. We provide machine-generated C-files-from-Haskell for this purpose, but it's really quite a pain to use them. If you must build GHC from its sources, using a binary-distributed GHC to do so is a sensible way to proceed. For the other fptools programs, many are written in Haskell, so binary distributions allow you to install them without having a Haskell compiler.) This guide is in two parts: installing on Unix-a-likes, and installing on Windows. For certain platforms, we provide GHC binaries packaged using the native package format for the platform. This is likely to be by far the best way to install GHC for your platform if one of these packages is available, since dependencies will automatically be handled and the package system normally provides a way to uninstall the package at a later date. We generally provide the following packages: RedHat Linux/x86 RPM source & binary packages for RedHat Linux (x86 only) are available for most major releases. Debian Linux/x86 Debian packages for Linux (x86 only), also for most major releases. FreeBSD/x86 On FreeBSD/x86, GHC can be installed using either the ports tree (cd /usr/ports/lang/ghc && make install) or from a pre-compiled package available from your local FreeBSD mirror. Other platform-specific packages may be available, check the GHC download page for details. bundles of binary stuff Binary distributions come in “bundles,” one bundle per file called bundle-platform.tar.gz. (See the building guide for the definition of a platform.) Suppose that you untar a binary-distribution bundle, thus: % cd /your/scratch/space % gunzip < ghc-x.xx-sun-sparc-solaris2.tar.gz | tar xvf - Then you should find a single directory, fptools, with the following structure: binary distribution, layout directory layout (binary distributions) Makefile.in the raw material from which the Makefile will be made (). configure the configuration script (). README Contains this file summary. INSTALL Contains this description of how to install the bundle. ANNOUNCE The announcement message for the bundle. NEWS release notes for the bundle—a longer version of ANNOUNCE. For GHC, the release notes are contained in the User Guide and this file isn't present. bin/platform contains platform-specific executable files to be invoked directly by the user. These are the files that must end up in your path. lib/platform/ contains platform-specific support files for the installation. Typically there is a subdirectory for each fptools project, whose name is the name of the project with its version number. For example, for GHC there would be a sub-directory ghc-x.xx/ where x.xx is the version number of GHC in the bundle. These sub-directories have the following general structure: libHSstd.a etc: supporting library archives. ghc-iface.prl etc: support scripts. import/ Interface files (.hi) for the prelude. include/ A few C #include files. share/ contains platform-independent support files for the installation. Again, there is a sub-directory for each fptools project. html/ contains HTML documentation files (one sub-directory per project). man/ contains Unix manual pages. OK, so let's assume that you have unpacked your chosen bundles into a scratch directory fptools. What next? Well, you will at least need to run the configureconfigure script by changing your directory to fptools and typing ./configure. That should convert Makefile.in to Makefile. installing in-place in-place installation You can now either start using the tools in-situ without going through any installation process, just type make in-place to set the tools up for this. You'll also want to add the path which make will now echo to your PATH environment variable. This option is useful if you simply want to try out the package and/or you don't have the necessary privileges (or inclination) to properly install the tools locally. Note that if you do decide to install the package `properly' at a later date, you have to go through the installation steps that follows. To install an fptools package, you'll have to do the following: Edit the Makefile and check the settings of the following variables: directories, installation installation directories platform the platform you are going to install for. bindir the directory in which to install user-invokable binaries. libdir the directory in which to install platform-dependent support files. datadir the directory in which to install platform-independent support files. infodir the directory in which to install Emacs info files. htmldir the directory in which to install HTML documentation. dvidir the directory in which to install DVI documentation. The values for these variables can be set through invocation of the configureconfigure script that comes with the distribution, but doing an optical diff to see if the values match your expectations is always a Good Idea. Instead of running configure, it is perfectly OK to copy Makefile.in to Makefile and set all these variables directly yourself. But do it right! Run make install. This should work with ordinary Unix make—no need for fancy stuff like GNU make. rehash (t?csh or zsh users), so your shell will see the new stuff in your bin directory. Once done, test your “installation” as suggested in . Be sure to use a -v option, so you can see exactly what pathnames it's using. If things don't work as expected, check the list of known pitfalls in the building guide. link, installed as ghc When installing the user-invokable binaries, this installation procedure will install GHC as ghc-x.xx where x.xx is the version number of GHC. It will also make a link (in the binary installation directory) from ghc to ghc-x.xx. If you install multiple versions of GHC then the last one “wins”, and “ghc” will invoke the last one installed. You can change this manually if you want. But regardless, ghc-x.xx should always invoke GHC version x.xx. bundles, binary There are plenty of “non-basic” GHC bundles. The files for them are called ghc-x.xx-bundle-platform.tar.gz, where the platform is as above, and bundle is one of these: prof: Profiling with cost-centres. You probably want this. profiling bundles bundles, profiling par: Parallel Haskell features (sits on top of PVM). You'll want this if you're into that kind of thing. parallel bundles bundles, parallel gran: The “GranSim” parallel-Haskell simulator (hmm… mainly for implementors). bundles, gransim gransim bundles ticky: “Ticky-ticky” profiling; very detailed information about “what happened when I ran this program”—really for implementors. bundles, ticky-ticky ticky-ticky bundles One likely scenario is that you will grab two binary bundles—basic, and profiling. We don't usually make the rest, although you can build them yourself from a source distribution. The various GHC bundles are designed to be unpacked into the same directory; then installing as per the directions above will install the whole lot in one go. Note: you must at least have the basic GHC binary distribution bundle, these extra bundles won't install on their own. testing a new GHC The way to do this is, of course, to compile and run this program (in a file Main.hs): main = putStr "Hello, world!\n" Compile the program, using the -v (verbose) flag to verify that libraries, etc., are being found properly: % ghc -v -o hello Main.hs Now run it: % ./hello Hello, world! Some simple-but-profitable tests are to compile and run the notorious nfibnfib program, using different numeric types. Start with nfib :: Int -> Int, and then try Integer, Float, Double, Rational and perhaps the overloaded version. Code for this is distributed in ghc/misc/examples/nfib/ in a source distribution. For more information on how to “drive” GHC, read on... Getting the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC) to run on Windows platforms can be a bit of a trying experience. It should be much easier now than in the past, since all the software required to build and use GHC is included in the InstallShield. An installation of GHC requires about 70M of disk space (which can be reduced by choosing a “compact” installation). To run GHC comfortably, your machine should have at least 64M of memory. Download the latest GHC distribution (ghc-4.08 InstallShield installer, 19M) from http://www.haskell.org/ghc/download.html It is packaged up using an installer that should be familiar-looking to Windows users. Note: The Cygwin support for long file names containing spaces is not 100%, so make sure that you install ghc in a directory that has no embedded spaces (i.e., resist the temptation to put it in /Program Files/!) When the installer has completed, make sure you add the location of the ghc bin/ directory to your path (e.g. /ghc/ghc-4.08/bin ). You need to do this in order to bring the various GHC binaries into scope. Also, if the directory C:/TEMP doesn't already exist, you should create it. To test the fruits of your labour, try now to compile a simple Haskell program: bash$ cat main.hs module Main(main) where main = putStrLn "Hello, world!" bash$ ghc -o main main.hs .. bash$ ./main Hello, world! bash$ OK, assuming that worked, you're all set. Go forth and write useful Haskell programs :-) If not, consult the installation FAQ (); if that still doesn't help then please report the problems you're experiencing (see ). Further information on using GHC under Windows can be found in Sigbjørn Finne's pages. Note: ignore the installation instructions, which are rather out of date; the Miscellaneous section at the bottom of the page is of most interest, covering topics beyond the scope of this manual. I'm having trouble with symlinks. Symlinks only work under Cygwin (), so binaries not linked to the Cygwin DLL, in particular those built for Mingwin, will not work with symlinks. I'm getting “permission denied” messages from rm or mv. This can have various causes: trying to rename a directory when an Explorer window is open on it tends to fail. Closing the window generally cures the problem, but sometimes its cause is more mysterious, and logging off and back on or rebooting may be the quickest cure. I get errors when trying to build GHC 4.08 with GHC 4.05. This seems to work better if you don't use -O in GhcHcOpts. It's a bug in 4.05, unfortunately. Anyway, better to install 4.08 binaries and use those. We use the DocBook DTD, which is widely used. Most shrink-wrapped distributions seem to be broken in one way or another; thanks to heroic efforts by Sven Panne and Manuel Chakravarty, we now support most of them, plus properly installed versions. Instructions on installing and configuring the DocBook tools follow. If you're using a system that can handle RedHat RPM packages, you can probably use the Cygnus DocBook tools, which is the most shrink-wrapped SGML suite that we could find. You need all the RPMs except for psgml (i.e. docbook, jade, jadetex, sgmlcommon and stylesheets). Note that most of these RPMs are architecture neutral, so are likely to be found in a noarch directory. The SuSE RPMs also work; the RedHat ones don't in RedHat 6.2 (7.0 and later should be OK), but they are easy to fix: just make a symlink from /usr/lib/sgml/stylesheets/nwalsh-modular/lib/dblib.dsl to /usr/lib/sgml/lib/dblib.dsl. On FreeBSD systems, the easiest way to get DocBook up and running is to install it from the ports tree or a pre-compiled package (packages are available from your local FreeBSD mirror site). To use the ports tree, do this: $ cd /usr/ports/textproc/docproj $ make install This installs the FreeBSD documentation project tools, which includes everything needed to format the GHC documentation. It's a good idea to use Norman Walsh's installation notes as a guide. You should get version 3.1 of DocBook, and note that his file test.sgm won't work, as it needs version 3.0. You should unpack Jade into \Jade, along with the entities, DocBook into \docbook, and the DocBook stylesheets into \docbook\stylesheets (so they actually end up in \docbook\stylesheets\docbook). Install OpenJade (Windows binaries are available as well as sources). If you want DVI, PS, or PDF then install JadeTeX from the dsssl subdirectory. (If you get the error: ! LaTeX Error: Unknown option implicit=false' for package hyperref'. your version of hyperref is out of date; download it from CTAN (macros/latex/contrib/supported/hyperref), and make it, ensuring that you have first removed or renamed your old copy. If you start getting file not found errors when making the test for hyperref, you can abort at that point and proceed straight to make install, or enter them as ../filename.) Make links from virtex to jadetex and pdfvirtex to pdfjadetex (otherwise DVI, PostScript and PDF output will not work). Copy dsssl/*.{dtd,dsl} and catalog to /usr/[local/]lib/sgml. Get a Zip of DocBook and install the contents in /usr/[local/]/lib/sgml. Get the DocBook stylesheets and install in /usr/[local/]lib/sgml/stylesheets (thereby creating a subdirectory docbook). For indexing, copy or link collateindex.pl from the DocBook stylesheets archive in bin into a directory on your PATH. Download the ISO entities into /usr/[local/]lib/sgml. Once the DocBook tools are installed, the configure script will detect them and set up the build system accordingly. If you have a system that isn't supported, let us know, and we'll try to help. If you install from source, you'll get a pile of warnings of the form DTDDECL catalog entries are not supported every time you build anything. These can safely be ignored, but if you find them tedious you can get rid of them by removing all the DTDDECL entries from docbook.cat.