OpenBSD installer / instructions

[mrijkeboer]

Any chance of getting a binary installer for OpenBSD (current, AMD64) or instructions on
how to get it working from source? I develop Haskell on OpenBSD and would like to use
stack.

[snoyberg]

Certainly, that would be great! The main thing we need is access to a
bindist. I'm on my phone right now, so can't point to the relevant files,
but we then just have some minor metadata files and lookups to update. If
you can take care of the hard part of making the bindist, I can point out
the rest.

On Thu, Jun 25, 2015, 8:07 PM Martijn Rijkeboer notifications@github.com
wrote:

Any chance of getting a binary installer for OpenBSD (current, AMD64) or
instructions on
how to get it working? I develop Haskell on OpenBSD and would like to use
stack.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#416.

[mrijkeboer]

I haven't made it, but here is the bindist that OpenBSD's GHC is using:

• https://openbsd.dead-parrot.de/distfiles/ghc-7.8.3.20150623-amd64-unknown-openbsd.tar.bz2

[snoyberg]

OK, I've pushed commits to both update stack with an OS key for OpenBSD, and add an entry for that bindist to the metadata file. Unfortunately, the LTS Haskell snapshots all require at least GHC 7.8.4, so this won't be compatible. You can use the resolver: ghc-7.8 to test in the meanwhile. Any possibility of a 7.10 release?

[mrijkeboer]

There is a OpenBSD package for GHC 7.8.4, but it is not a bindist, but a full package:

• http://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/snapshots/packages/amd64/ghc-7.8.4p2.tgz

[mrijkeboer]

I've also asked one of the maintainers of OpenBSD's GHC package if it's possible to get a 7.8.4 and
or 7.10 bindist.

[ketzacoatl]

I will work towards having OpenBSD available on AMD64 so I can better serve testing and such here. ATM, I only have OpenBSD on i386, and GHC is complete broken there.

[mrijkeboer]

I received the following from one of the maintainers of OpenBSD GHC package:

I'm trying to make FPComplete's Haskell tool Stack work on OpenBSD [1]. For
this a bindist is needed. I have found the bindist for GHC 7.8.3 on
dead-parrot.de but for compatibility with LTS Haskell a bindist for 7.8.4
and preferable 7.10 is needed.

Please don't use the bindists from dead-parrot.de (or from any
OpenBSD mirrors holding distfiles for ports), they're trimmed down
to the absolute minimum required to build the lang/ghc port on
OpenBSD, and they may disappear when they aren't of use for the
ports tree any longer (for example, not required for the last two
or three stable releases of OpenBSD, nor for current).

Is it hard to create bindist's for 7.8.4 and 7.10

It depends on your definition of 'hard' ;-)

and can I do this myself?

It should be possible, at least for 7.8.4, with some knowledge about
ports(7) and make(1). Grab a recent OpenBSD ports tree and look at
/usr/ports/lang/ghc. There's a bootstrap target in the Makefile
that builds the trimmed down bindists I use to bootstrap the real
ghc package.

Note that the version number of the built bootstrapper / bindist
is defined in the make variable MODGHC_VER in ghc.port.mk. When
building new bootstrappers / bindists like some days ago, I set
this to the previos ghc release, because for whatever reason,
building the ghc port using a bootstrapper with the same version
just fails. But for your case, this shouldn't matter (you don't
want to build the port but just the bootstrapper / bindist).

To get a full-fledged bindist, you'll have to fiddle with the
bootstrap target of the ports Makefile, especially with all those

    echo .... >> ${WRKSRC}/mk/build.mk

lines. I don't know wether just removing them all would work, you'll
have to experiment a little bit here (and read the ghc build
documentation).

For ghc-7.10, you'd have to change the lang/ghc port to build 7.10,
which may be easy or not (I didn't work on this yet, because I'm
still unsure wether to keep everything close to haskell-platform
or not).

BTW: if I switch to 7.10 some day, you'll no longer be able to
use the (then 7.10) port for building a 7.8 bindist, so it may be
a good idea to keep a diff and all the files created during make
patch for 7.8 now.

Also be aware that you'll have to build and distribute new bindists
whenever OpenBSDs base libraries (or packages like iconv) get major
updates.

Ciao,
Kili

ps: feel free to quote this mail or parts of it on the gitub issue
tracker ;-)

[ketzacoatl]

Similarly, Kili was able to provide me with some clarification for GHC OpenBSD i386/AMD64:

I do not currently have an AMD64 host available, but my tests with GHC on
i386 have failed miserably. My assumption is that AMD64 is functional, but
i386 is not going to get the fixes it would need.. but maybe this is wrong
and both should be working?

ghc on i386 has issues -- the dynamic linker contained in the ghc
runtime system doesn't work on i386, so ghci doesn't work, and
several haskell package which require ghc loading libraries and
objects during compile time (probably required by template haskell)
don't build.

While I do not have strong C (or Haskell.. still learning), I am an avid
OpenBSD user/sysadmin and interested in ensuring GHC (and stack) runs well
on OpenBSD. To that end, I would be interested in helping you to whatever
degree I am able.

No strong C knowledge, so I guess trying to fix the dynamic linker
of ghc (rts/Linker.c) isn't something for you

But if you are comfortable with the OpenBSD ports system, make(1)
and GNU make (which is used to build ghc), and are willing to
wrap your head around ghc's build system, you could try to build
the ghc port with real shared libraries enabled. This could allow
ghci and other parts of ghc to use OpenBSDs native shared loader
for dynamic haskell libraries.

Ciao,
Kili