So you want to start writing some haskell? Here’s some of the stuff that’s not completely obvious when you are setting up a dev environment.

  • Cabal, cabal-install, etc.

Cabal is a library that ships with GHC. cabal-install is a program that is separate, and can sometimes be a real pain in the ass to install. For instance, right now (as I type this out) if you download GHC 7.4.1 and install it, and get cabal-install from hackage, it won’t build via the handy-dandy boostrap.sh script. It will say it requires a different version of Cabal. That can be a real wtf moment. Usually, this will get you out of the bind:

Check out, or download cabal from the official Github repo. There’s a link to download a zip file of that repo if you don’t have Git installed.

Inside that directory, there is another directory called cabal-install. Try running the bootstrap.sh script in there. If it works, you’re done! If not, back up to the top level cabal directory and build that like so:

  1. ghc --make Setup (no, not Setup.hs which should be a file in that directory, just Setup)
  2. ./Setup configure --user
  3. ./Setup build
  4. ./Setup install

Now, you have a pretty good chance of cabal-install from the directory before installing.

I’ll try to keep on the lookout for other things.