Getting Cabal to run on Mac OS X Leopard

Jan — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 12:19:14 +0000

In preparation for the work on my Haskell NXT Library, I needed to install Yampa today. The official page lists version 0.9.1 as most recent, though that release is from 2002. Newer (though kinda “inofficial”) versions are available through Hackage/Cabal. Getting Cabal to work wasn’t difficult at all in the end, but scraping together all the information on how to get there was a bit tricky for an absolute n00b like me. I publish my steps here so that others trying to get Cabal to run on Leopard (or other systems) can save some time.

First, you should have GHC installed via MacPorts (sudo port install ghc)

I installed darcs too, but I don’t even think that was necessary (sudo port install darcs)

Now, the most recent Cabal Library (the one included in MacPorts GHC was a bit outdated):
Go to http://haskell.org/cabal/, download and untar the most recent Cabal (library) and cabal-install (commandline interface) packages. Install Cabal as root, as described in the readme-file:

ghc --make Setup.hs
./Setup configure
./Setup build
sudo ./Setup install

For cabal-install to compile, we need to further libraries, HTTP and zlib, both obtainable in the HackageDB (just follow the links). Download and untar, then proceed as with Cabal:

ghc --make Setup.lhs (.lhs in case of HTTP, zlib uses the .hs extension)
./Setup configure
./Setup build
sudo ./Setup install

Finally change to the cabal-install directory and repeat these steps again.

After cabal-install is installed, run cabal update to obtain the latest package list. Now you can install packages via cabal install

Jan Varwig » install

Getting Cabal to run on Mac OS X Leopard