The problem people have been having with ghci on FreeBSD turns out to be a bootstrapping issue: if the bootstrap compiler was not built with readline support, or it doesn't include ghc-pkg (the FreeBSD bootstrap ghc has been stripped down to bare essentials, so guess what's not there?), then ghc won't be built with readline support unless you build the stage2 and stage3 compilers. Since ports only builds stage1, with the crippled bootstrap ghc, the result is no readline in ghc itself. (But the readline package is built, so Haskell programs which themselves use readline work fine.) The attached patch is a simplistic, hacky workaround which stubs out the offending configure test. Since ports ghc declares readline as a dependency, this is safe (or at least safe enough). Drop it into / usr/ports/lang/ghc/files and (re)build ghc (either "cd /usr/ports/ lang/ghc; make install clean -DFORCE_PKG_REGISTER", or "portupgrade - f ghc", or deinstall and reinstall from scratch). You will probably want to do something to keep it from being removed or to copy it back when you update the ports tree with portsnap or cvsup. I'm not going to bother reporting this to the port maintainer because it'll just get stuck in the same queue that's holding the ghc-6.6 upgrade. :) -- brandon s. allbery [linux,solaris,freebsd,perl] allbery@kf8nh.com system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery@ece.cmu.edu electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university KF8NH