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.

Table of Contents

• Why
• Installation
• Usage
• Contributing
• TODO
• Feature considerations
• Known problems

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I don't use stack, but cabal new-* and system GHC versions are often either outdated or cannot be installed in parallel with proper symlink management.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.pl from debian devscripts
• whitespaces, no tabs

TODO

• FreeBSD support (#4)
• Make fetching tarballs more robust (#5)
• More code documentation

Feature considerations

• Allow to compile from source (#2)
• Allow to install cabal-install as well (#3)

Known problems

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.