On Thu, Dec 24, 2009 at 2:24 AM, Jon Harrop
For some reason all traffic from this beginners list stopped reaching me after the 13th of December.
Thanks for the response, Antoine. I've tried to install more recent versions of GHC (6.10 and 6.12) but I cannot get either of them to work at all.
GHC 6.8 generates code that segfaults and the GHC 6.10 from Debian testing cannot compile anything for me. So I thought I'd try GHC 6.12. That isn't in any repo so I decided to build it from source. I uninstalled all other GHCs to give it a fresh start. The GHC page says "Stop, install the Haskell Platform" but the Haskell Platform says you must install GHC first, so I've got a nice circular dependency right from the start!
So I tried installing GHC 6.12 from source but that requires GHC to be installed. So I installed GHC 6.8 (the one that segfaults) using apt again from Debian. That seems to have built a GHC 6.12 that I can run from the command line but it cannot compile that program because it doesn't have parallel stuff. So I thought I'd install the Haskell Platform.
The Haskell Platform is currently the recommended way to go, but it won't be up on GHC 6.12 until some time in the new year (I don't know their timelines). For me, I didn't have a working GHC 6.12 setup until this morning. The compiler is ready, but we're still working on moving the libraries over to the new major version. Maybe compiling your own 6.10.4 would be the best choice until the next platform release. If you're willing to dive in, the version of cabal-install that works for GHC 6.12.1 is out now, but it does require some boot-strapping to get going, as GHC no longer ships libraries that aren't required to build GHC. But back to the GHC panic, it might be worth posting that error to the GHC-users list I mentioned earlier. Antoine