I'm making a GHC package for Salix 14 (which is backwards-compatible with Slackware, so this will be a Slackware package, too). The main thing I'd be grateful for advice on is the overall approach I'm taking to the package. Others I've seen (such as the Arch package) just assume GHC is already present. My build script unpacks the binary distribution for "unknown linux" and builds GHC against that. (Both are version 7.4.2.) I have avoided installing anything else (such as the Haskell Platform) so as to keep as close as possible to the ideal of a package as a transparent, reproducible process that only depends on the source. As far as I can tell from the build prerequisites http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Building/Preparation/Tools the only consequence is that documentation is only created as html, not pdf and ps as well. Though everything seems to work ok, the build as it stands fails three tests: Unexpected failures: lib/Time T5430 [bad stdout] (normal) perf/compiler parsing001 [stat not good enough] (normal) simplCore/should_compile spec-inline [stderr mismatch] (optasm) That is after running the fast version of the test suite, which the documentation says should pass 100%. My second question is, do these results suggest anything as to where the problem may lie, and how important it is? When I then installed the new package and built the Haskell Platform against it (using the build script at http://slackbuilds.org), although the installation nonetheless appeared to be succesful, the build script failed at the very end where it tries to do ghc-pkg recache When I did this manually, I discovered root permissions were needed. Is that normal?