I was waiting for my backups to be done hence this article, as I was using git-annex to manage my files and I decided I needed to have git-annex on a SL5 based machine. SL5 is just an opensource clone/recompile of RHEL5.
I haven't tried to install the newer versions of Haskell Platform and GHC in a while on SL5 to install git-annex. But the last time I checked when GHC7 was out, it was a pain to install GHC on SL5.
However I have discovered that someone has gone through the trouble of packaging up GHC and Haskell Platform for RHEL based distros.
- http://justhub.org/download - Packaged GHC and Haskell Platform RPM's for RHEL based systems.
I'm primarily interested in installing git-annex on SL5 based systems. The installation process goes as such...
First install GHC and Haskell Platform (you need root for these following steps)
$ wget http://sherkin.justhub.org/el5/RPMS/x86_64/justhub-release-2.0-4.0.el5.x86_64.rpm
$ rpm -ivh justhub-release-2.0-4.0.el5.x86_64.rpm
$ yum install haskell
The RPM's don't place the files in /usr/bin, so you must add the following to your .bashrc (from here on you don't need root if you don't want things to be system wide)
$ export PATH=/usr/hs/bin:$PATH
Once the packages are installed and are in your execution path, using cabal to configure and build git-annex just makes life easier, it should install all the needed dependancies.
$ cabal update
$ git clone git://git.kitenet.net/git-annex
$ cd git-annex
$ make git-annex.1
$ cabal configure
$ cabal build
$ cabal install
Or if you want to install it globallly for everyone (otherwise it will get installed into $HOME/.cabal/bin)
$ cabal install --global
The above will take a while to compile and install the needed dependancies. I would suggest any user who does should run the tests that comes with git-annex to make sure everything is functioning as expected.
I haven't had a chance or need to install git-annex on a SL6 based system yet, but I would assume something similar to the above steps would be required to do so.
The above is almost a cut and paste of http://jcftang.github.com/2012/06/15/installing-git-annex-on-sl5/, the above could probably be refined, it was what worked for me on SL5. Please feel free to re-edit and chop out or add useless bits of text in the above!
Note: from the minor testing, it appears the compiled binaries from SL5 will work on SL6.