Installing pre-supposed utilities

Building the Glasgow Functional Programming Tools Suite
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# 6. Installing pre-supposed utilities

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

  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.

  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.

Perl

  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.

GNU C (gcc)

  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)

GNU Make

  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

  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

  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.

autoconf

  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`.

sed

  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.

## 6.1. Tools for building parallel GHC (GPH)

PVM version 3:

  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.

bash:

  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).

## 6.2. Other useful tools

Flex

  This is a quite-a-bit-better-than-Lex lexer. Used to build a couple of utilities in `glafp-utils`. Depending on your operating system, the supplied lex may or may not work; you should get the GNU version.

More tools are required if you want to format the documentation that comes with GHC and other fptools projects. See Section 9.

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