+1 This is really awesome, and definitely would have made my life easier the first time I installed GHC. -Kevin On May 23, 2014, at 11:56 PM, Adam Bergmark wrote:

Nice, thanks for doing this!

I'll make sure to try this next time i need to install GHC.

- Adam

On Fri, May 23, 2014 at 8:42 PM, Bob Ippolito wrote: After seeing some demand for packaged Haskell for Mac for the IHaskell project and by word of mouth at BayHac I decided to take a stab at it. Here you go: http://ghcformacosx.github.io/ (currently GHC 7.8.2 and cabal-install 1.20.0.1)

Why?

It can be a bit cumbersome to use the GHC builds from haskell.org on Mac, because they don't come "fully baked", you have to ./configure --prefix=/some/path to get them installed and the installation is not relocatable, if you move it the scripts will break and the package.conf.d files will go stale. It also doesn't ship with cabal-install, which is cumbersome as well, especially for new users.

How does it work?

In https://github.com/ghcformacosx/ghc-dot-app I have a Main.hs script which downloads/builds/etc. all of the prerequisites. Then it patches the shell scripts to use a path relative to themselves (after following symlinks) rather than hard-coding an installation location. It also patches the package.conf.d files to use ${pkgroot} relative paths.

Separately, there's an Xcode project that includes all of the metadata to make it look like a real Mac app bundle (icons, Info.plist) and a small Cocoa application that has a button to open the docs and provides instructions for adding it to the PATH in .bashrc. Due to the heuristics in Mac OS X's man, this will automatically make man pages work as well. Using Xcode here also makes it produce a signed build (which I do, since I am already paying for the $99/year license).

-bob

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That's really cool. Is there some way that a CI task could be set up to automatically publish new versions? On Sat, May 24, 2014 at 5:03 PM, Carter Schonwald wrote:

i'd totally support making this prominently visible on haskell.org

On Sat, May 24, 2014 at 2:58 AM, Kevin Nardi wrote:

...

+1

This is really awesome, and definitely would have made my life easier the first time I installed GHC.

-Kevin

On May 23, 2014, at 11:56 PM, Adam Bergmark wrote:

Nice, thanks for doing this!

I'll make sure to try this next time i need to install GHC.

- Adam

On Fri, May 23, 2014 at 8:42 PM, Bob Ippolito wrote:

...

After seeing some demand for packaged Haskell for Mac for the IHaskell project and by word of mouth at BayHac I decided to take a stab at it. Here you go: http://ghcformacosx.github.io/ (currently GHC 7.8.2 and cabal-install 1.20.0.1)

Why?

It can be a bit cumbersome to use the GHC builds from haskell.org on Mac, because they don't come "fully baked", you have to ./configure --prefix=/some/path to get them installed and the installation is not relocatable, if you move it the scripts will break and the package.conf.d files will go stale. It also doesn't ship with cabal-install, which is cumbersome as well, especially for new users.

How does it work?

In https://github.com/ghcformacosx/ghc-dot-app I have a Main.hs script which downloads/builds/etc. all of the prerequisites. Then it patches the shell scripts to use a path relative to themselves (after following symlinks) rather than hard-coding an installation location. It also patches the package.conf.d files to use ${pkgroot} relative paths.

Separately, there's an Xcode project that includes all of the metadata to make it look like a real Mac app bundle (icons, Info.plist) and a small Cocoa application that has a button to open the docs and provides instructions for adding it to the PATH in .bashrc. Due to the heuristics in Mac OS X's man, this will automatically make man pages work as well. Using Xcode here also makes it produce a signed build (which I do, since I am already paying for the $99/year license).

-bob

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On May 26, 2014, at 9:08 AM, Richard Cobbe wrote:

On Mon, May 26, 2014 at 08:23:22AM -0400, Bob Hutchison wrote:

...

On May 23, 2014, at 2:42 PM, Bob Ippolito wrote:

...

After seeing some demand for packaged Haskell for Mac for the IHaskell project and by word of mouth at BayHac I decided to take a stab at it. Here you go: http://ghcformacosx.github.io/ (currently GHC 7.8.2 and cabal-install 1.20.0.1)

Thank you! Wonderful!

I think this is the way to go for anyone setting up Haskell for the first time on a Mac. I agree that this should be a very prominently displayed installation option on haskell.org

Asking purely out of curiosity: what's the advantage to doing this over using the Haskell Platform installer? (Other than the fact that the latter hasn't seen a release in a year, I mean.)

That’s a pretty good reason :-) Have a look at this thread “Minimal Haskell Platform” https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/haskell-cafe/-MrmFsyq-FM for a lot of discussion. There have been other threads in various mailing lists touching on this recently. Cheers, Bob

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On Mon, May 26, 2014 at 5:36 PM, Bob Ippolito wrote:

On Monday, May 26, 2014, Bob Hutchison wrote:

...

On May 26, 2014, at 9:08 AM, Richard Cobbe wrote:

...

On Mon, May 26, 2014 at 08:23:22AM -0400, Bob Hutchison wrote:

...

On May 23, 2014, at 2:42 PM, Bob Ippolito wrote:

...

After seeing some demand for packaged Haskell for Mac for the IHaskell project and by word of mouth at BayHac I decided to take a stab at it. Here you go: http://ghcformacosx.github.io/ (currently GHC 7.8.2 and cabal-install 1.20.0.1)

Thank you! Wonderful!

I think this is the way to go for anyone setting up Haskell for the first time on a Mac. I agree that this should be a very prominently displayed installation option on haskell.org

Asking purely out of curiosity: what's the advantage to doing this over using the Haskell Platform installer? (Other than the fact that the latter hasn't seen a release in a year, I mean.)

That’s a pretty good reason :-)

Have a look at this thread “Minimal Haskell Platform” https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/haskell-cafe/-MrmFsyq-FM for a lot of discussion. There have been other threads in various mailing lists touching on this recently.

In addition to that, you can only have one Haskell Platform install and you need admin to install it. With this, you don't need admin and can have as many "installs" as you want (although it won't save you from .ghc or .cabal hell).

I have three platforms installed. As long as they have different GHC versions, there's no problem, I think. Should I be aware of something? Erik

Richard Cobbe wrote:

...

...

...

Asking purely out of curiosity: what's the advantage to doing this over using the Haskell Platform installer? (Other than the fact that the latter hasn't seen a release in a year, I mean.)

Bob Hutchison wrote:

...

...

That’s a pretty good reason :-)

There has indeed been an usual delay in the current HP release. Despite Mark Lentzner's hard work it has gone way past due. Not a small part of the reason for that delay was the Mac platform, with all of the problems introduced by Xcode 5. It looks like the next HP is finally nearing release though. It will be based on GHC 7.8.2. Bob Ippolito wrote:

...

In addition to that, you can only have one Haskell Platform install

Erik Hesselink wrote:

I have three platforms installed. As long as they have different GHC versions, there's no problem, I think.

And no two HP's have every had the same GHC version. So that should never be an issue. That said, I think I might prefer having just one HP and then this new method for other versions of GHC. What I like most about this is that since it doesn't need to be bundled with the HP libraries, this installer will be much easier to update promptly when new versions of GHC are released. So I can get the best of both worlds - the standard set of HP packages and versions, plus other versions of GHC that aren't part of an HP release. Regards, Yitz

Travis Cardwell wrote:

I wrote an article explaining how I install multiple versions and avoid ~/.cabal hell (on Debian Wheezy):

Thanks for this detailed write up! I have two comments: 1. When you switch to a different version of GHC using the PATH, you also need to take into account the cabal command. Normally you will want to be using the most recent cabal command, but your procedure will switch you over to whatever version of the cabal command was shipped with that version of GHC, because that GHC bin directory now comes first in the PATH. 2. You don't need to have cabal-install installed globally. All you need is the executable. To fix these, add the following to your procedure: 1. Create the directory /usr/local/opt/cabal/bin 2. Create a new empty dir, cd into it, and run: cabal sandbox init; cabal install cabal-install Copy .cabal-sandbox/bin/cabal to /usr/local/opt/cabal/bin [Note: if the cabal bundled with your initial GHC version is too old to support sandboxes, then instead do cabal install cabal-dev; cabal-dev install cabal-install and then copy cabal-dev/bin/cabal to /usr/local/opt/cabal/bin ] 3. Add /usr/local/opt/cabal/bin to your PATH, or install /usr/local/opt/cabal using stow. 4. When you switch to a different version of GHC by setting the PATH, do this instead of what you wrote: export PATH=/usr/local/opt/cabal/bin:/usr/local/opt/ghc-7.6.3-2013.2.0.0/bin:$PATH Regards, Yitz

On Monday, May 26, 2014, Bob Hutchison wrote:

On May 23, 2014, at 2:42 PM, Bob Ippolito javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','bob@redivi.com');> wrote:

After seeing some demand for packaged Haskell for Mac for the IHaskell project and by word of mouth at BayHac I decided to take a stab at it. Here you go: http://ghcformacosx.github.io/ (currently GHC 7.8.2 and cabal-install 1.20.0.1)

Thank you! Wonderful!

I think this is the way to go for anyone setting up Haskell for the first time on a Mac. I agree that this should be a very prominently displayed installation option on haskell.org

Might be worth waiting a little while to shake out any issues, but I'm ok with that.

So, Bob, have you thought about how you’ll avoid having to maintain this forever?

I wrote up instructions for how to build it. Could be done by a CI builder, although it needs someone's signing key to build one suitable for distro. Happy to take it on myself for now as I'm already paying for the Mac developer subscription so might as well use it. -bob

I didn't have any problems using HP from homebrew but it installs packages globally which seems to be frowned upon. On Fri, May 30, 2014 at 2:36 PM, Alexey Muranov wrote:

On Monday, May 26, 2014 2:23:34 PM UTC+2, Bob Hutchison wrote:

...

I think this is the way to go for anyone setting up Haskell for the first time on a Mac. I agree that this should be a very prominently displayed installation option on haskell.org

Are there any drawbacks in installing Haskell with Homebrew?

Alexey.

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On Fri, May 30, 2014 at 5:36 AM, Alexey Muranov wrote:

On Monday, May 26, 2014 2:23:34 PM UTC+2, Bob Hutchison wrote:

...

I think this is the way to go for anyone setting up Haskell for the first time on a Mac. I agree that this should be a very prominently displayed installation option on haskell.org

Are there any drawbacks in installing Haskell with Homebrew?

Homebrew mostly works fine, but this self-contained version doesn't have any dependencies outside of Xcode and thus you can get it up and running much more quickly. Not everyone uses homebrew. -bob

And more importantly: no one familiar with ghc is actively making sure the ghc formula on brew stays kosher. On Friday, May 30, 2014, Christopher Allen wrote:

Compilation time is a pain and using homebrew's GHC package could break other homebrew recipes, particularly Ruby ones that rely on native compilation.

On Fri, May 30, 2014 at 1:24 PM, Bob Ippolito javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','bob@redivi.com');> wrote:

...

On Fri, May 30, 2014 at 5:36 AM, Alexey Muranov javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','alexey.muranov@gmail.com');> wrote:

...

On Monday, May 26, 2014 2:23:34 PM UTC+2, Bob Hutchison wrote:

...

I think this is the way to go for anyone setting up Haskell for the first time on a Mac. I agree that this should be a very prominently displayed installation option on haskell.org

Are there any drawbacks in installing Haskell with Homebrew?

Homebrew mostly works fine, but this self-contained version doesn't have any dependencies outside of Xcode and thus you can get it up and running much more quickly. Not everyone uses homebrew.

-bob

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