Thomas Davie
It finally broke when hmake tried to bootstrap it's self and decided that the -p meant try to load the package gcc3, does anyone have any idea how to get round that?
-pgmP "gcc3 -E -traditional"
My guess is that hmake is interpreting this as two separate arguments, rather than a single option to be passed through to the compiler. So you need somehow to hide these options from the hmake command-line, using a different mechanism to pass them to the compiler. (1) You could create a shell alias for ghc to always add the necessary arguments e.g. (in bash) alias ghc ghc -pgmP "gcc3 -E -traditional" (but beware of different behaviours in non-interactive shells). (2) You could add the extra arguments into hmake's configuration. e.g. in lib/powerpc-Darwin/hmakerc change , extraCompilerFlags = [] to , extraCompilerFlags = ["-pgmP \"gcc3 -E -traditional\""] and make sure that the extra arguments also appear in the finally-installed hmakerc file. (3) You could add the options into the HFLAGS environment variable e.g. (in bash) HFLAGS="-pgmP \"gcc3 -E -traditional\"" export HFLAGS The HFLAGS variable is expanded into the compiler's commandline by hmake. Regards, Malcolm