Installing Haskell Platform on Debian testing

Janne Hellsten on February 20, 2014

I usually hit some snags when installing Haskell Platform (HP) on either Ubuntu or Debian. I thought this time I would get lucky, and get it installed without trouble.

First Attempt

In anticipation of a great success, I first blew away all my local installs of HP and GHC, followed by direct haskell-platform package installation:

apt-get install haskell-platform

D’oh, Debian testing’s HP is at 2012.2.0.0. Too old, I want a later version.

HP 2013.2.0.0 requires GHC 7.6.3, so let’s install that. I follow the links on Haskell Platform for Linux and find the GHC 7.6.3 binary release. Trying to install it according to its installation steps..

Hmm, a problem with libgmp.so.3:

~/t/ghc-7.6.3$ ./configure 
checking for path to top of build tree... utils/ghc-pwd/dist-install/build/tmp/ghc-pwd: 
error while loading shared libraries: libgmp.so.3: cannot open shared object file: 
No such file or directory

I try installing libgmp.so.3:

apt-get install libgmp-dev

Oh, it’s already at a newer version, i.e., at libgmp.so.10.

Googling.. Oh, symlink to fake that I have libgmp.so.3. Sounds dodgy. Well, I’ll install GHC from source instead.

So I download the GHC 7.6.3 source package, build it and install it. At this point you need to have some older version of GHC still installed. So I use GHC 7.4.1 from the Debian testing package.

With all this done, installing Haskell Platform from source is easy if you managed to correctly install all the prerequisites.

Then I try to update my cabal-install, so I do:

cabal update
cabal install cabal-install

Whoops:

Building cabal-install-1.18.0.2...
Preprocessing executable 'cabal' for cabal-install-1.18.0.2...

Main.hs:118:8:
    Could not find module `Distribution.Version'
    There are files missing in the `Cabal-1.18.1.1' package,
    try running 'ghc-pkg check'.
    Use -v to see a list of the files searched for.

Even though I had blown away my .cabal and previous HP installation directories from under my $HOME, I still had managed to leave in a .ghc directory. Nuking that fixed the last problem.

Final Installation Steps

For my future reference, here are the high-level steps I took to install the latest released Haskell Platform:

  1. Prerequisites: some version of GHC installed. In my case GHC 7.4.1 from Debian. Various other packages are needed for HP, these are easy to google so not listing them here.
  2. Download GHC 7.6.3 source release, standard ./configure && make && make install installation
  3. Check that ghc --version is 7.6.3. If it’s not, your PATH points to the previous GHC version.
    • Not sure if it’s recommended to remove the previous GHC installation at this point. Will I get into trouble with conflicting GHC versions if I don’t remove it here?
    • Removed GHC 7.4.1 with apt-get remove ghc and hash -r to let bash know ghc is at a new location now.
  4. Download the Haskell Platform 2013.2.0.0 source tarball from haskell.org/platform/linux.html
    • Install as per instructions while being careful to choose a global package database installation as opposed to a user local package db. Otherwise you may face issues like cabal-install #1695.

Phew, now it’s all done.