Some brief notes on how I got Haskell up and running on OSX 10.5 PPC. They might not be complete as I’m always overly optimistic about my ability to recall and/or write things up promptly.

  1. Yay! Some kind soul (Michael Witten) put together a nice community edition of GHC 6.10.1. I think the only thing I had to do was create a symbolic link in /usr/local/lib for libgmp.3.dylib to my macports installed version. It’s not the latest and greatest version of GHC, but is more than enough for my dabblings at the moment.
  2. I then followed the steps here to get cabal-install built and installed. The versions I ended up using, that worked well together, were:

    And these I’m not strictly sure I needed:

    • mtl-2.1.1 (installed for HTTP-4000.2.3, but in hindsight I don’t know for sure if I needed this)
    • transformers-0.3.0.0 (Installed for mtl-2.1.1, but same applies as above)

    For zlib I had to tweak the zlib.cabal file to point at my Macports libraries, i.e. find the include-dirs: line and append ` /macports/lib`.

    These were actually found with a bit of trial and error: I started with the most recent versions and tried to build them and any new dependencies since the Real World Haskell article, and when I hit a problem I downgraded (which also meant downgrading other packages I’d already installed because of inter-dependencies). I just installed them all in my home directory.

  3. After getting cabal-install built and installed I thought it would be plain sailing installing the rest of the packages I needed for my HaskerDeux app. And it was - once I learnt to point it in the direction of my Macports libraries, etc:

     cabal install 'split' --extra-include-dirs=/macports/include --extra-lib-dirs=/macports/lib

    (Also, since I was installing into ~/.cabal it was necessary to add ~/.cabal/bin into my $PATH so other packages could find them if necessary). You can also install specific versions with Cabal, like so:

     cabal install 'json-0.4.4'

    Older versions of Network.Curl and Text.JSON seem to work fine with HaskerDeux (I’m not exactly pushing the boundaries). These are the ones I installed:

  4. There is no step 4. Althought I suppose the next thing I could do is look to see if I can use this version of ghc to help my build a more recent one, but I don’t really see a big need for me to do that.