On Thu, May 2, 2013 at 6:26 AM, Adrian May <adrian.alexander.may@gmail.com> wrote:
So WASH is ancient history. OK, lets forget it.

How about the Haskell Platform? Is that ancient history? Certainly not: it doesn't compile on anything but the very newest GHC. Not 7.4.1 but 7.4.2.

GHC is up to 7.6.
 
Now that's rapid maintenance, but it's still version hell because you've got to have that compiler installed first (even though HP is supposed to be a way to acquire haskell) and you probably haven't. You've probably got the one from the linux package which hasn't been maintained since, ooh, must have been at least a week ago, so you install the new one and you've trashed cabal. How long is that puzzle gonna take to unravel?

About 12 seconds, if you read http://www.haskell.org/platform/linux.html:

Download the source tarball for Unix-like systems: here

Get and install GHC 7.4.2 prior to building the platform:

Finally, unpack the Haskell Platform source tarball, and run (possibly with 'sudo'):

    ./configure
    make
    make install