Am Samstag, 29. November 2008 11:41 schrieb John Meacham:
On Fri, Nov 28, 2008 at 07:41:42PM -0800, Don Stewart wrote:
john:
On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 07:20:12PM -0800, Jason Dagit wrote:
I spoke with the author of the fork a bit in IRC around the time it happened and my understanding is that: 1) John sternly objects to using cabal as the build system for JHC
This is a fairly silly reason to fork a project, especially jhc, for a number of reasons.
One of the reasons though, for the branching, is that the potential developers, who all have Haskell toolchains, couldn't do:
$ cabal install jhc
Then now can, but have to write 'lhc' instead of 'jhc'.
We've probably just increased the jhc "alpha user" base 10 fold. Hooray!
Yes, that's very nice to be able to just type $ cabal update $ cabal install whatever and cabal automatically takes care of dependencies (unfortunately only Haskell dependencies, but hey, can't expect real magic), while the configure && make build system requires me to do it all myself (which becomes a real PITA when there are many dependencies not yet installed).
Also, I am not so sure who these people are who are willing to type 10 characters to try out jhc, but not a dozen more.
I doubt a few dozen keystrokes make a difference to those who are willing to try out jhc, but chasing dependencies could make a difference. Fortunately jhc hasn't many, so I was ready to try both methods. 1. cabal install lhc 20 minutes later I have an lhc executable installed (and the graphviz package), great, can't be any simpler. Unfortunately: $ lhc -o lhcHeap heapMain lhc: user error (LibraryMap: Library base not found!) Oops. 2. grab jhc, configure && make I need ghc >= 6.8.2, yes, 6.8.3 DrIFT, yes, 2.2.3 binary, yes zlib, yes Great, nothing I don't already have, so download the source tarball, unpack and ./configure --prefix=$HOME checking for a BSD-compatible install... /usr/bin/install -c checking whether build environment is sane... yes ... more configure output ... checking for drift-ghc... no configure: error: DrIFT not found get it from http://repetae.net/computer/haskell/DrIFT/ Huh? dafis@linux:~/jhc/jhc-0.5.20080307> which DrIFT /home/dafis/.cabal/bin/DrIFT dafis@linux:~/jhc/jhc-0.5.20080307> DrIFT --version Version DrIFT-2.2.3 Okay, ./configure --help and searching through the configure script (which I completely don't know the syntax of) lead me to try ./configure --prefix=$HOME DRIFTGHC=/home/dafis/.cabal/bin/DrIFT which successsfully completes the configure step, but shouldn't configure find executables in the path? Now make. Lots of warnings, but doesn't fail. make install, okay, ready to go. helloWorld works, good, but dumps thousands of lines of output I don't want. How do I tell jhc to shut up, and why isn't that the default? Now something a bit harder, make me a couple of primes. First problem: import System.Environment (getArgs) Error: Module not found: System.Environment Okay, different organisation of base package, mildly annoying, use import System (getArgs). Now ... myriads of lines of output ... jhc: user error (Grin.FromE - Unknown primitive: ("eqRef__",[EVar (6666::ELit (Data.IORef.Ref__ (ELit (Jhc@.Box.*::ESort *))::ESort #)),EVar (6670::ELit (Data.IORef.Ref__ (ELit (Jhc@.Box.*::ESort *))::ESort #))])) What? And I get the same error for every nontrivial programme I tried to compile, but not for a couple of trivial programmes. So I spent a few of hours to litter my hard disk with a completely useless broken lhc and a basically useless broken jhc :( Conclusion: the cabal package is much easier to install, but in this case the result of configure && make is marginally more useful. However, neither produced a working compiler, so no cake. Both systems suck when they fail. Cheers, Daniel