Haskell (ghc)

moonwyrd

Wanting to revive what little Haskell I know I installed the ghc package. After entering your basic Hello World program and trying to compile it I got this:

/usr/bin/ld.bfd: cannot find -lHSbase-4.12.0.0
/usr/bin/ld.bfd: cannot find -lHSinteger-gmp-1.0.2.0
/usr/bin/ld.bfd: cannot find -lHSghc-prim-0.5.3
/usr/bin/ld.bfd: cannot find -lHSrts
/usr/bin/ld.bfd: cannot find -lCffi
x86_64-solus-linux-gcc' failed in phaseLinker'. (Exit code: 1)

after trying various compiler flags to get more verbose output from the compiler and checking what libraries were installed I developed (no pun intended) a hunch that installing the ghc-devel package might resolve the problem. Sure enough after installing it compiling the file worked and it ran just fine.

I'm wondering if this is expected behavior? From my past experience the -devel type packages would only be needed for actually working on the compiler itself, not using it compile general code. Am I misunderstanding the nature of these packages on Solus?

Thanks.

DataDrake

moonwyrd ghc provides both the compiler and the shared (dynamic) standard libraries. ghc-devel has the static libraries. When you compile a dynamic application (e.g. pandoc), it will like against the shared libraries in ghc, making ghc a runtime dependency of the package. Admittedly, I probably could pattern the ghc package a little differently to split out the shared libraries, but it currently follows the same splitting rule as all of the other haskell packages:

ghc -> shared libs and executables
ghc-devel -> static libs

So to answer your original question: Yes it is expected behavior, and sorry for the confusion.