The packaging used to provide GHC 7.0.4 for OS X fails for 32 bit -- cannot install

[InvisibleTech]

I have been using homebrew package manager for OS X 10.5.8 for installing tools like erlang, mongo etc.. At some point I used to be able to install earlier versions of GHC. However, after two days of reinstalling tools, verifying errors I filed a report to homebrew:

 https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/issues/11671

The report in I have logged contains every atom of information I could gather and it has been stored at this Git Gist:

 https://gist.github.com/0bc9c8aff119527f2ec2

A respondent on the homebrew board was able to reproduce the issue and suggested I contact the GHC team:

 https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/issues/11671#issuecomment-5140879

He referenced this Stack Overflow link:

 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1440456/static-libraries-in-version-cross-compiled-program

[simonmar]

How does the homebrew installer bootstrap GHC? Does it download a binary distribution first? I suspect perhaps that the binary distribution it is using does not support OS X 10.5.

Someone else on the CC list might be able to confirm or add more info.

[InvisibleTech]

I posted your question back to GitHub? but also took a shot at reading the code in the script for homebrew GHC. The url I find that is used to get the GHC image is:

"http://www.haskell.org/ghc/dist/7.0.4/ghc-7.0.4-i386-apple-darwin.tar.bz2"

I think that is in my gist of logs also.

[InvisibleTech]

Replying to simonmar:

How does the homebrew installer bootstrap GHC? Does it download a binary distribution first? I suspect perhaps that the binary distribution it is using does not support OS X 10.5. Someone else on the CC list might be able to confirm or add more info.

<see comment I added>

[simonmar]

I believe our binary distributions don't support 10.5, see #5011.

[InvisibleTech]

What if you are on 10.5 with XCode 3.1.latest ? I read the above link it seems to be for people building GHC on 10.6 for 10.5.

So do I read this as: we cannot build it for 10.5 users AND they cannot compile it either (on 10.5)? Or do I read it as no one can build it for 10.5 ever, anymore?

[igloo]

As far as I know, building on 10.5 will work if you have a working GHC already. But the above tarball is a binary distribution, not the source code, and won't work on 10.5.

[simonmar]

InvisibleTech?: just to clarify, what you need is a binary distribution built for 10.5. The distributions we build are for 10.6 and don't work on 10.5, but there's nothing stopping you building one yourself on 10.5.

The Haskell Platform downloads explicitly state that they work on 10.6 and later:  http://hackage.haskell.org/platform/mac.html, and that page points you to an older version (2010.2.0.0) if you have 10.5.

[marlowsd@…]

commit 84d79a2a1f5aa16fffbc1451d229930abf8da36b

Author: Simon Marlow <marlowsd@gmail.com>
Date:   Mon Apr 16 14:54:45 2012 +0100

    distclean was removing ghc-pwd/dist, should be ghc-pwd/dist-boot
    
    This has been causing bloat in the src dist for ages.
    
    Noticed while looking at #6009, but I don't think this is the bug
    (./configure always removes ghc-pwd/dist-boot before building ghc-pwd)

 ghc.mk |    2 +-
 1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-)