universal binary version of Haskell Platform?

[Gregory Collins]

Benjamin L. Russell <DekuDekuplex at Yahoo.com> writes:

> Recently, in changing my work schedule to work mainly from home, I
> switched from mainly using a work Wintel machine running Windows XP
> Professional, Service Pack 3, to mainly using my home PowerPC G4
> PowerBook Macintosh, currently upgraded to Mac OS X 10.5.8 Leopard.
>
> However, to my surprise, there does not seem to be a version of the
> Haskell Platform that runs natively on my current OS.
>
> Does anybody know where to find a universal binary version of the
> Haskell Platform, or at least of GHC 6.10.4?  Otherwise, I'm stuck
> without a native version for my currently installed OS.
>
> Incidentally, since my OS is currently very unstable (10.5.x Leopard,
> unlike 10.4.x Tiger, is reportedly very finicky about the RAM
> installed, and I haven't upgraded my Mac from the original allotment
> of 512 MB), there is a possibility that I may temporarily downgrade it
> to Mac OS X 10.4.8 Tiger, pending purchasing more RAM.  If a universal
> binary version does exist, will it also work with Mac OS X 10.4.8
> Tiger?

I don't have any immediate plans to support Tiger, although this is
something people have asked for.

If it was easy to do, it'd be done already. I've had pleasant dreams of
strangling the Apple engineers responsible for their installer system --
they have at least six different (and mutually incompatible) binary
package formats, one of which is so inscrutable that I've given up on
trying to reverse-engineer it; no provision for uninstallation; no
documentation; etc, etc. Apple expects you to use its (hellishly buggy)
graphical tools to build packages from within the context of an Xcode
project, and "screw you!" if you want to do anything different.

The tool that takes cabal libraries and builds OSX packages is called
cabal2macpkg (http://github.com/gregorycollins/cabal2macpkg) -- a while
back I had a version that generated Tiger-format installers, because the
Tiger-era installer packages are a lot simpler to understand and build.
(and Apple's command-line tools actually work!)

I had to scrap that plan because the installer system wouldn't let me
bundle a Tiger-format package and a Leopard-format package (i.e. the
GHC binary installation package) together into the same package. The
code could be rescued & cleaned up from the version control history but
I don't have a Tiger machine (or a PPC) so someone else would have to
pick up that ball in order to build Haskell Platform binaries for Tiger
or for PPC machines, sorry.

G
-- 
Gregory Collins <greg at gregorycollins.net>