Cant do annotations without GHCi

[erikd]

First found this while working on bug #4999 on powerpc-linux. I tried to disable building GHCi because #4999 and GHCi are related in some way. However the problem also exists on x86_64-linux.

Building from git master branch. If I do

echo "GhcWithInterpreter=NO" >> mk/build.mk

followed by configure and build I get:

ghc-stage2: panic! (the 'impossible' happened)
  (GHC version 7.1.20110408 for x86_64-unknown-linux):
        Cant do annotations without GHCi
    {103:19-33}
    base:GHC.Exts.ForceSpecConstr{d rcU}

Please report this as a GHC bug:  http://www.haskell.org/ghc/reportabug

make[1]: *** [libraries/vector/dist-install/build/Data/Vector/Fusion/Stream/Monadic.o] Error 1
make: *** [all] Error 2

[simonmar]

We should give a sensible error message rather than a panic, but apart from that it isn't a bug.

If all you want to do is build GHC without GHCi support, then you can work around this by not building the DPH packages:

./sync-all --no-dph get

[erikd]

I tried this again by doing:

git clone http://darcs.haskell.org/ghc.git ghc-no-ghci
cd ghc-no-ghci/
./sync-all --no-dph get
echo "GhcWithInterpreter=NO" >> mk/build.mk
perl boot
./configure
make

and I can actually build the compiler.

[simonmar]

Thanks for following up.