Here are the gory details about some utility programs you may need; perl, gcc and happy are the only important ones. (PVM is important if you're going for Parallel Haskell.) The configure script will tell you if you are missing something.
GHC is required to build many of the tools, including GHC itself. If you need to port GHC to your platform because there isn't a binary distribution of GHC available, then see Section 10, “Porting GHC”.
Which version of GHC you need will depend on the packages you intend to build. GHC itself will normally build using one of several older versions of itself - check the announcement or release notes for details.
You have to have Perl to proceed! Perl version 5 at least is required. GHC has been known to tickle bugs in Perl, so if you find that Perl crashes when running GHC try updating (or downgrading) your Perl installation. Versions of Perl that we use and are known to be fairly stable are 5.005 and 5.6.1.
For Win32 platforms, you should use the binary
supplied in the InstallShield (copy it to
/bin). The Cygwin-supplied Perl seems
not to work.
Perl should be put somewhere so that it can be invoked
by the #! script-invoking
mechanism. The full pathname may need to be less than 32
characters long on some systems.
We recommend using GCC version 2.95.2 on all platforms. Failing that, version 2.7.2 is stable on most platforms. Earlier versions of GCC can be assumed not to work, and versions in between 2.7.2 and 2.95.2 (including egcs) have varying degrees of stability depending on the platform.
GCC 3.2 is currently known to have problems building GHC on Sparc, but is stable on x86.
If your GCC dies with “internal error” on
some GHC source file, please let us know, so we can report
it and get things improved. (Exception: on x86
boxes—you may need to fiddle with GHC's
-monly-N-regs option; see the User's
Guide)
The fptools build system makes heavy use of features specific to GNU make, so you must have this installed in order to build any of the fptools suite.
Happy is a parser generator tool for Haskell, and is
used to generate GHC's parsers. Happy is written in
Haskell, and is a project in the CVS repository
(fptools/happy). It can be built from
source, but bear in mind that you'll need GHC installed in
order to build it. To avoid the chicken/egg problem,
install a binary distribution of either Happy or GHC to get
started. Happy distributions are available from Happy's Web
Page.
Alex is a lexical-analyser generator for Haskell, which GHC uses to generate its lexer. Like Happy, Alex is written in Haskell and is a project in the CVS repository. Alex distributions are available from Alex's Web Page.
GNU autoconf is needed if you intend to build from the CVS sources, it is not needed if you just intend to build a standard source distribution.
Version 2.52 or later of the autoconf package is required. NB. version 2.13 will no longer work, as of GHC version 6.1.
autoreconf (from the autoconf package)
recursively builds configure scripts from
the corresponding configure.ac and
aclocal.m4 files. If you modify one of
the latter files, you'll need autoreconf to
rebuild the corresponding configure.
You need a working sed if you are going to build from sources. The build-configuration stuff needs it. GNU sed version 2.0.4 is no good! It has a bug in it that is tickled by the build-configuration. 2.0.5 is OK. Others are probably OK too (assuming we don't create too elaborate configure scripts.)
One fptools project is worth a quick note
at this point, because it is useful for all the others:
glafp-utils contains several utilities which
aren't particularly Glasgow-ish, but Occasionally Indispensable.
Like lndir for creating symbolic link
trees.
PVM is the Parallel Virtual Machine on which Parallel Haskell programs run. (You only need this if you plan to run Parallel Haskell. Concurrent Haskell, which runs concurrent threads on a uniprocessor doesn't need it.) Underneath PVM, you can have (for example) a network of workstations (slow) or a multiprocessor box (faster).
The current version of PVM is 3.3.11; we use 3.3.7.
It is readily available on the net; I think I got it from
research.att.com, in
netlib.
A PVM installation is slightly quirky, but easy to
do. Just follow the Readme
instructions.
Sadly, the gr2ps script, used to convert “parallelism profiles” to PostScript, is written in Bash (GNU's Bourne Again shell). This bug will be fixed (someday).
More tools are required if you want to format the documentation that comes with GHC and other fptools projects. See Section 9, “Building the documentation”.