Great! Does this mean we can submit GHC to be distributed from Apple's "hackage", http://www.apple.com/downloads/ ? (Click the "Submit Downloads" button). -- Don chak:
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Finally, you can have the glorious GHC in a format satisfying the discerning Mac user:
http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~chak/haskell/GHC-6.8.2.20080211-i386.pkg
Installation instructions: nil
This is *not* the same compiler as in the official 6.8.2 release. It is the state of the 6.8 branch at the 11th of February - hence, the funny version number. Once, 6.8.3 is being released, there'll be a clean release package.
The package includes all extra libraries and full documentation. It installs GHC systemwide and requires an admin password.
Happy Installing! Manuel
-=- Extra details for the curious -=-
GHC is being packaged as a framework bundle - GHC.framework - that is installed in /Library/Frameworks/. As far as I can tell this is the most appropriate way of bundling a compiler environment on the Mac. Frameworks are versioned and we use GHC's integer version number to assign framework versions - ie, the present package installs version 608. This is in line with Apple's recommendation to use version numbers that signify API changes for frameworks. The package installs appropriate links in /usr/bin, /usr/man/man1, and /usr/share/doc to make the binaries, ghc manpage, and html documentation easily accessible. Furthermore, it comes with a shell script that removes the GHC.framework and all symbolic links into the framework.
The framework is currently not relocatable and an admin password is needed to install it. Contributions improving this situation would be most welcome.
The GHC binary in the package links statically against GNU readline (to provide editing capabilities at the GHCi prompt). This is fine as GHC's BSD3 licence is compatible with readline's GPL, and it does *not* affect programs compiled with GHC at all.
The above package is for Intel Leopard. I expect that a separate PPC version is easy to build (but cross-compilation and fat binaries are not supported by GHC). I am less sure about building packages on Tiger as I don't know whether the underlying Xcode project requires Xcode 3.0 - Tiger only has 2.5. However, it should be possible to build packages on Leopard that run on both Tiger and Leopard. (I could give that a try if anybody with a Tiger box is willing to play guinea pig.)
Further information on GHC installer packages as well as instructions on how to build your own are at
http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Building/MacOSX/Installer _______________________________________________ Glasgow-haskell-users mailing list Glasgow-haskell-users@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users