readline confusion building ghc6.6.1 on OS X

[hal@…]

Because of another software package, I had previously installed gnu readline 5.1 in /usr/local. In order to build ghc 6.6.1, I first installed the pre-built version of 6.6 and during that installation there was a message about replacing the system readline as part of the install (alas, I forgot to write down the exact message). When I ran make after configuring 6.6.1, the haskell library readline function didn't compile, and the make aborted when a later step couldn't find readline to build the libraries.

I tried again with a freshly unpacked source directory but after reinstallng gnu's readline first, and the build appears to have completed successfuly this time.

So something isn't quite right in the way that readline is handled, either because 6.6 deleted something that it shouldn't have, or the build is very sensitive to where readline is and has problems if there is a copy in /usr/local, or some other reason.

Of course this is less important now that a pre-built 6.6.1 is available on the web site, but it would be nice to clean up if possible.

[maeder@…]

related to #1395

[chak]

If you look at (the description of) the prebuild macos binaries for 6.6, you'll see that they include a post-install script fiddling with readline. As far as I can see, the current head has no readline issues. NB: if you keep your readline in a non-standard location (eg, MacPorts installs it into /opt/local), you have to pass --with-readline-libraries and --with-readline-includes to configure.

I close this bug as it is an issue with the 6.6 binaries and not with the current tree.