Installing GHC 7.8 on centos6 + EPEL 7.8

gistfile1.md

Installation instructions

Base packages

Installed from this base centos package list: https://gist.github.com/casr/235395cdcb23c00ad409

(Had epel & build tools already installed.)

Install GHC Dependencies

• ncurses-devel
• ghc-7.0.3 (from EPEL)
• Also make sure the box has 2GiB of memory (haddock generation is memory hungry) and at least 10GiB of disk.

GHC 7.0.3

Installed 7.0.3 from EPEL

GHC 7.6

• Downloaded http://www.haskell.org/ghc/dist/7.6.3/ghc-7.6.3-src.tar.bz2

• ./configure && make (about an hour)

• make install

• [vagrant@vagrant-centos64 ghc-7.6.3]$ ghc --version

  The Glorious Glasgow Haskell Compilation System, version 7.6.3

GHC 7.8

• http://www.haskell.org/ghc/dist/7.8.1-rc2/ghc-7.8.0.20140228-src.tar.bz2

• ./configure && make (about an hour)

• make install

• [vagrant@vagrant-centos64 ghc-7.8.1-20140228]$ ghc --version

  The Glorious Glasgow Haskell Compilation System, version 7.8.0.20140228

cabal-install 1.18

• Downloaded http://www.haskell.org/cabal/release/cabal-install-1.18.0.2/cabal-install-1.18.0.2.tar.gz
• yum install zlib-devel (1.2.3-29.el6)
• PREFIX=/usr sh bootstrap.sh

References

• http://www.haskell.org/cabal/download.html
• http://www.haskell.org/ghc/dist/
• http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/7.6.3/html/users_guide/using-ghc.html

Notes for future dev

GHC by default statically links stuff rather than dynamically linking to stuff in the pkg db. It does mean that we could never run ghci on production (probably a good thing) but if we stick with this all we need to deploy is the resulting binary.

You can dynamically link, but then we'd just have to package stuff up in sandboxes anyhow. May only be useful if we had a package with lots of little binaries (thus lots of copies of the libs). Probably not worth it.