4. Installing from binary distributions

Installing from binary distributions is easiest, and recommended! (Why binaries? Because GHC is a Haskell compiler written in Haskell, so you've got to ``bootstrap'' it, somehow. We provide machine-generated C-files-from-Haskell for this purpose, but it's really quite a pain to use them. If you must build GHC from its sources, using a binary-distributed GHC to do so is a sensible way to proceed. For the other fptools programs, many are written in Haskell, so binary distributions allow you to install them without having a Haskell compiler.)

4.1 Bundle structure

Binary distributions come in ``bundles,'' one bundle per file called <bundle>-<platform>.tar.gz. (See Section Porting Information for what a platform is.) Suppose that you untar a binary-distribution bundle, thus:

  % cd /your/scratch/space
  % gunzip < ghc-x.xx-sun-sparc-solaris2.tar.gz | tar xvf -

Then you should find a single directory, fptools, with the following structure:

Makefile.in

the raw material from which the Makefile will be made (Section Installation).

configure

the configuration script (Section Installing).

README

Contains this file summary.

INSTALL

Contains this description of how to install the bundle.

ANNOUNCE

The announcement message for the bundle.

NEWS

release notes for the bundle -- a longer version of ANNOUNCE. For GHC, the release notes are contained in the User Guide and this file isn't present.

bin/<platform>

contains platform-specific executable files to be invoked directly by the user. These are the files that must end up in your path.

lib/<platform>/

contains platform-specific support files for the installation. Typically there is a subdirectory for each fptools project, whose name is the name of the project with its version number. For example, for GHC there would be a sub-directory ghc-x.xx/ where x.xx is the version number of GHC in the bundle.

These sub-directories have the following general structure:

libHS.a etc:

supporting library archives.

ghc-iface.prl etc:

support scripts.

import/

Interface files (.hi) for the prelude.

include/

A few C #include files.

share/

contains platform-independent support files for the installation. Again, there is a sub-directory for each fptools project.

info/

contains Emacs info documentation files (one sub-directory per project).

html/

contains HTML documentation files (one sub-directory per project).

man/

contains Unix manual pages.

This structure is designed so that you can unpack multiple bundles (including ones from different releases or platforms) into a single fptools directory

this doesn't work at the moment

  % cd /your/scratch/space
  % gunzip < ghc-x.xx-sun-sparc-solaris2.tar.gz | tar xvf -
  % gunzip < happy-x.xx-sun-sparc-sunos4.tar.gz | tar xvf -

When you do multiple unpacks like this, the top level Makefile, README, and INSTALL get overwritten each time. That's fine -- they should be the same. Likewise, the ANNOUNCE-<bundle> and NEWS-<bundle> files will be duplicated across multiple platforms, so they will be harmlessly overwritten when you do multiple unpacks. Finally, the share/ stuff will get harmlessly overwritten when you do multiple unpacks for one bundle on different platforms.

Installing

OK, so let's assume that you have unpacked your chosen bundles into a scratch directory fptools. What next? Well, you will at least need to run the configure script by changing your directory to fptools and typing ./configure. That should convert Makefile.in to Makefile.

You can now either start using the tools in-situ without going through any installation process, just type make in-place to set the tools up for this. You'll also want to add the path which make will now echo to your PATH environment variable. This option is useful if you simply want to try out the package and/or you don't have the necessary priviledges (or inclination) to properly install the tools locally. Note that if you do decide to install the package `properly' at a later date, you have to go through the installation steps that follows.

To install an fptools package, you'll have to do the following:

1. Edit the Makefile and check the settings of the following variables:

   platform

   the platform you are going to install for.

   bindir

   the directory in which to install user-invokable binaries.

   libdir

   the directory in which to install platform-dependent support files.

   datadir

   the directory in which to install platform-independent support files.

   infodir

   the directory in which to install Emacs info files.

   htmldir

   the directory in which to install HTML documentation.

   dvidir

   the directory in which to install DVI documentation.

   The values for these variables can be set through invocation of the configure script that comes with the distribution, but doing an optical diff to see if the values match your expectations is always a Good Idea. Instead of running configure, it is perfectly OK to copy Makefile.in to Makefile and set all these variables directly yourself. But do it right!
2. Run make install. This should work with ordinary Unix make -- no need for fancy stuff like GNU make.
3. rehash (t?csh or zsh users), so your shell will see the new stuff in your bin directory.
4. Once done, test your ``installation'' as suggested in Section Testing GHC. Be sure to use a -v option, so you can see exactly what pathnames it's using. If things don't work as expected, check the list of know pitfalls in Section Building Pitfalls.

When installing the user-invokable binaries, this installation procedure will install GHC as ghc-x.xx where x.xx is the version number of GHC. It will also make a link (in the binary installation directory) from ghc to ghc-x.xx. If you install multiple versions of GHC then the last one ``wins'', and ``ghc'' will invoke the last one installed. You can change this manually if you want. But regardless, ghc-x.xx should always invoke GHC version x.xx.

4.2 What bundles there are

There are plenty of ``non-basic'' GHC bundles. The files for them are called ghc-x.xx-<bundle>-<platform>.tar.gz, where the <platform> is as above, and <bundle> is one of these:

prof:

Profiling with cost-centres. You probably want this.

conc:

Concurrent Haskell features. You may want this.

par:

Parallel Haskell features (sits on top of PVM). You'll want this if you're into that kind of thing.

gran:

The ``GranSim'' parallel-Haskell simulator (hmm... mainly for implementors).

ticky:

``Ticky-ticky'' profiling; very detailed information about ``what happened when I ran this program''---really for implementors.

prof-conc:

Cost-centre profiling for Concurrent Haskell.

prof-ticky:

Ticky-ticky profiling for Concurrent Haskell.

One likely scenario is that you will grab three binary bundles---basic, profiling, and concurrent. We don't usually make the rest, although you can build them yourself from a source distribution.

4.3 Testing that GHC seems to be working

The way to do this is, of course, to compile and run this program (in a file Main.hs):

main = putStr "Hello, world!\n"

Compile the program, using the -v (verbose) flag to verify that libraries, etc., are being found properly:

% ghc -v -o hello Main.hs

Now run it:

% ./hello
Hello, world!

Some simple-but-profitable tests are to compile and run the notorious nfib program, using different numeric types. Start with nfib :: Int -> Int, and then try Integer, Float, Double, Rational and maybe Complex Float. Code for this is distributed in ghc/misc/examples/nfib/ in a source distribution.

For more information on how to ``drive'' GHC, either do ghc -help or consult the User's Guide (distributed in several pre-compiled formats with a binary distribution, or in source form in ghc/docs/users_guide in a source distribution).