3.0 KiB
GHC up
Installs a specified GHC version into ~/.ghcup/ghc/<ver>,
and places ghc-<ver> etc. symlinks in ~/.ghcup/bin/.
Additionally allows to manage currently selected ghc
via unversioned symlinks.
This uses precompiled GHC binaries that have been compiled on fedora/debian by upstream GHC.
Alternatively, you can also tell it to compile from source (note that this might fail due to missing requirements).
In addition this script can also install cabal-install.
Table of Contents
Why
I don't use stack, but cabal new-* and system GHC versions
are often either outdated or cannot be installed in parallel
with proper symlink management.
Inspired by rustup.
Installation
Just place the ghcup shell script into your PATH anywhere
(preferably ~/.local/bin).
Usage
See ghcup --help.
Contributing
- PR or email
- this script is POSIX shell
- use shellcheck and
checkbashisms.plfrom debian devscripts - whitespaces, no tabs
TODO
- FreeBSD support (#4)
- Make fetching tarballs more robust (#5)
- More code documentation
- Allow to compile from source (#2)
- Allow to install cabal-install as well (#3)
Known problems
Precompiled binaries
Since this uses precompiled binaries you may run into problems with ncurses and missing libtinfo, in case your distribution doesn't use the legacy way of building ncurses and has no compatibility symlinks in place.
Ask your distributor on how to solve this.
Unreliable download location
There is no single reliable URL where to download future GHC binary releases from, since the tarball names contain the distro name and version they were built on. As such, we cannot foresee what will be the next tarball name.
In such a case, consider to update this script via
ghcup self-update.
Compilation
Although this script can compile GHC for you, it's just a very thin wrapper around the build system. It makes no effort in trying to figure out whether you have the correct toolchain and the correct dependencies. Refer to the official docs on how to prepare your environment for building GHC.