Daniel Carrera writes:
It's not often that it takes me more than a week to compile a program.
You should have posted a short message to the list, asking whether anyone happened to have a tar.gz archive with Solaris binaries lying around that he can send you. I'm willing to bet that would have been a lot faster than trying to bootstrap the software yourself for a _week_, because the "you need GHC to compile GHC" problem virtually ceases to exist once you _have_ GHC.
At this point I decide that I'll teach people Python instead of Haskell. I don't particularly like Python, but hey, it works.
Why don't you use the NHC98 compiler you had already running? Or Hugs98, which is self-contained? I think it's a shame that your students don't get the chance to learn a purely functional language just because the GHC team doesn't have a volunteer to provide Solaris binaries. Hint, hint. ;-) Peter