brad clawsie
4) The fix to the "bug" is simply download and install the libreadline4 shared object. No recompilation or reinstallation necessary.
i'm not sure if this has been addressed - but is there a specific reason an older version of the readline library is in use? v5 appears to be stable and has been in use for some time now.
Actually some sources recommend to just symlink libreadline.so.4 to libreadline.so.5. I haven't tried, but since version 5 is supposed to be upwards compatible to version 4 it's reasonable to expect that it works (to a certain extend). To me (as an outsider) the whole thing certainly looks like a quirk/buglet in the ghc build process (why not just link to the available readline?), but IMO that is no reason for a "ghc is not ripe for prime time" outcry. Ghc is for programmers and there is a certain extend of ability to help yourself I'd be expecting from programmers. If one doesn't have it, he/she should just use the packages of his/her distro or another distro. Regards -- Markus