OSX installer -- first draft

[Duncan Coutts]

On Tue, 2009-06-02 at 00:20 -0400, Gregory Collins wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> After months of intense frustration I have something approaching a
> reasonable OSX installer for the Haskell Platform. I'd appreciate it if
> some OSX hackers could try it out.
>
> The installer can be downloaded from:
> http://gregorycollins.net/static/haskell/haskell-platform-2009.2.0.1-alpha1.pkg

Woo! Well done.

> Please do me a favour and don't link there from the haskell platform
> website :)

Right :-)

I've forwarded your message to the ghc-users list so we can get some
feedback from more OSX users.

> Features/caveats:
> 
>   * it presupposes GHC-6.10.3 is installed from the binary distro. The
>     final release will bundle the two together in a .dmg file.

So that's the weirdness wit the ghc .pkg being somehow incompatible with
the tools right? Did we tell GHC HQ what versions of the tools you're
using. Did you experiment with making a ghc .pkg yourself using your
versions of the tools?

>   * it installs the platform libraries and executables to
>     /Library/Framework/HaskellPlatform.framework, registers the
>     libraries with GHC, and symlinks the binaries to /usr/local/bin

Sounds sensible.

>   * I had to build the distro package by hand using Apple's GUI tool
>     because I can't figure out how to do it otherwise -- and not for
>     lack of trying, either, I reckon I've put 20-30 man-hours into
>     trying to figure it out -- thanks Apple! Similarly, for the life of
>     me I cannot figure out how to bundle GHC and the platform libs
>     together into one installer.

Perhaps later when you have a moment (which I appreciate may not be for
some time) you could post about the details of what is supposed to work
but doesn't. In particular if you have suggestions for how to change
what ghc does for 6.12 that'd be useful. Eg, if combining .pkg files is
totally broken, would it be preferable to build ghc and the platform
packages together in one build tree rather than trying to merge/combine
them later?

>   * There's some haddock documentation in there but I'm not sure how
>     nicely it's cross-linked.

That's an issue on the Windows one too. It's mostly a Cabal issue
really.

>   * The code is a mess, I need to clean it up (and systematize the
>     process) before it's fit for inclusion into the project.
> 
>   * I've done some (very) limited testing but given how difficult the
>     whole project has been, I fully expect problems.
> 
> Sorry about how long it's taken --

You've put in a huge amount of effort, we're very grateful to have you
on the project!

> I'm getting married on Saturday (!) so finding time to work on this
> has been difficult indeed.

Congratulations! Have a great time.

Duncan