Installing Haskell

Created: 2014-09-14

Contents

• On a new machine
• Pandoc
• Hakyll

• Chris Done pointed me to this page
• to get cabal, use this. I had an older version of cabal already on my machine (1.20.0.0), so just deleted that from ~/.cabal/lib/i386-linux-ghc-7.4.1/ and then installed the new library. This way, cabal-install will use the new library (you can verify this with cabal --version once cabal-install is installed).

On a new machine

This is how I would do it given a new Debian stable machine with no previous installations of Haskell. It’s easy to just install haskell-platform, but this introduces an older version of cabal, which may or may not be annoying. The following is the minimal way to get things installed.

sudo aptitude install ghc ghc-haddock zlib1g-dev # or maybe libghc-zlib
                                    # will work too; actually, 
                                    # "libghc-zlib-dev" will pull
                                    # "zlib1g-dev" so it doesn't really
                                    # matter
wget https://www.haskell.org/cabal/release/cabal-install-1.20.0.3/cabal-install-1.20.0.3.tar.gz
tar -zxf cabal-install-1.20.0.3.tar.gz && rm cabal-install-1.20.0.3.tar.gz
# on Linux Mint using cabal-install-1.22.4.0.tar.gz, I also had to install ghc-prof and ghc-dynamic for this to work.
./bootstrap.sh
echo "PATH+=':$HOME/.cabal/bin'" >> ~/.bashrc
cabal update && cabal install cabal cabal-install alex happy

Pandoc

Doing

cabal update
cabal install --force pandoc pandoc-citeproc

seemed to work. When I just did cabal install hakyll (since that is why I wanted Pandoc), the install failed with

pandoc-1.13.1 failed during the building phase. The exception was:
ExitFailure 1

(See the discussion here, which may or may not be relevant.)

Since I had some really old versions of Pandoc and cabal on my machine (from the Debian repositories), I just redefined my path with $HOME/.cabal/bin as the first item, so that the newer programs in there would take priority.

Hakyll

did not work when I just did cabal install hakyll. I had to force install Pandoc again and then do cabal install hakyll once more. Strange…

2014-10-10: I had to do cabal --force-reinstall install hakyll. waiting to see if it works…

Tags: computing, Debian, Haskell, Linux, programming.

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