[Agda] Install failure

[Christoph Herrmann]

Hi Guillaume!

> Now it is and everything went fine.

Does it work now because you had good luck or do you 
understand precisely what went wrong and why it works now?
Maybe you have a rather fresh system so there is little
that can confuse cabal. I guess that because cabal
did not make much problems for me with a version 
of happy I installed from a different source.

However, I had and have endless problems with cabal since
a year or even longer. I even went back to ghc-6.12.3 a few months 
ago, but this is no longer acceptable for me now.

Just today I wiped my entire cabal installation after cabal 
was not happy with installing two different versions of process 
in any order at the same time. I tried to reinstall 
cabal (using ghc-7.0.2) and got the message that base and filepath 
was missing (which I unregistered before with ghc-pkg due to 
shadowing conflicts). 

I managed to install base via MacPorts but cabal Setup was not
happy with the version of base although the version was in the
range which Setup reported. I also do not know where to get
filepath from.

The general problem is that the cabal installation (from .tar) via the Setup
program already assumes that the right libraries are installed in
the right version. The README does not provide help which
versions are actually required, where they can be downloaded 
and how they can be installed (such that cabal is happy!)

It is really frustrating that all these installation tools such
as Mac ports, fink, apt-get, cabal, darcs at some point
just break with a message telling more or less that the
dependency structure is broken, even if one starts
from a fresh installation of that installation tool and even 
though they have the capability to download everything that 
is available from the web.

It would be good if either cabal could be provided using a
dmg- installer or a script which downloads all the required libraries,
but given the experience from the past I have little hope.

But for people which are not interested in many diverse Haskell
tools and just want to get  Agda working it would probably be 
best if the Agda installation be made independent from cabal.

Best Regards

On 22 Mar 2011, at 19:06, gallais @ EnsL.org wrote:

> Hi list,
> 
> I am trying to install Agda on my netbook using cabal and it keeps failing
> because happy is not found¹. I tried to install it manually² but [cabal info
> happy] is not really reassuring given that... it cannot see it :
> 
> cabal info happy
> * happy            (program)
>    Synopsis:      Happy is a parser generator for Haskell
>    Latest version available: 1.18.6
>    Latest version installed: [ Unknown ]
>    Homepage:      http://www.haskell.org/happy/
>    Bug reports:   mailto:marlowsd at gmail.com
>    Description:
>    Category:      Development
>    License:       BSD3
>    Author:        Andy Gill and Simon Marlow
>    Maintainer:    Simon Marlow <marlowsd at gmail.com>
>    Source repo:   [ Not specified ]
>    Executables:   happy
>    Flags:         small_base
>    Dependencies:  base >=1.0 && <2.1, containers -any, array -any, base >=2.1,
>                   mtl >=1.0, base <5
>    Cached:        Yes
> 
> Has anyone already encountered such a problem?
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> --
> gallais
> 
> ¹
> cabal install Agda
> (...)
> setup: happy version >=1.17 is required but it could not be found.
> cabal: Error: some packages failed to install:
> Agda-2.2.10 depends on haskell-src-exts-1.9.6 which failed to install.
> haskell-src-exts-1.9.6 failed during the configure step. The exception was:
> ExitFailure 1
> 
> ²
> cabal install happy
> Resolving dependencies...
> [1 of 1] Compiling Main             (
> /tmp/happy-1.18.63596/happy-1.18.6/Setup.lhs,
> /tmp/happy-1.18.63596/happy-1.18.6/dist/setup/Main.o )
> 
> /tmp/happy-1.18.63596/happy-1.18.6/Setup.lhs:6:51:
>    Warning: In the use of `buildVerbose'
>             (imported from Distribution.Simple.Setup):
>             Deprecated: "Use buildVerbosity instead"
> 
> /tmp/happy-1.18.63596/happy-1.18.6/Setup.lhs:7:51:
>    Warning: In the use of `defaultUserHooks'
>             (imported from Distribution.Simple):
>             Deprecated: "Use simpleUserHooks or autoconfUserHooks,
> unless you need Cabal-1.2
>             compatibility in which case you must stick with defaultUserHooks"
> Linking /tmp/happy-1.18.63596/happy-1.18.6/dist/setup/setup ...
> Warning: defaultUserHooks in Setup script is deprecated.
> Configuring happy-1.18.6...
> Preprocessing executables for happy-1.18.6...
> Building happy-1.18.6...
> [ 1 of 18] to [18 of 18] without any problem
> Linking dist/build/happy/happy ...
> Installing executable(s) in /home/gallais/.cabal/bin
> _______________________________________________
> Agda mailing list
> Agda at lists.chalmers.se
> https://lists.chalmers.se/mailman/listinfo/agda

--
 Dr. Christoph Herrmann
 University of St Andrews, Scotland/UK
 phone: office: +44 1334 461629, home: +44 1334 478648 
 email: ch at cs.st-andrews.ac.uk,  c.herrmann at virgin.net
 URL:   http://www.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~ch
 
 The University of St Andrews is a charity registered in Scotland: No SC013532