One difficulty that comes up from time to time is running out of space
in TMPDIR. (It is impossible for the configuration stuff to
compensate for the vagaries of different sysadmin approaches to temp
space.)
The quickest way around it is setenv TMPDIR /usr/tmp or
even setenv TMPDIR . (or the equivalent incantation with your shell
of choice).
The best way around it is to say
export TMPDIR=<dir>
in your build.mk file.
Then GHC and the other fptools programs will use the appropriate directory
in all cases.
In compiling some support-code bits, e.g., in ghc/rts/gmp and even
in ghc/lib, you may get a few C-compiler warnings. We think these
are OK.
When compiling via C, you'll sometimes get “warning: assignment from
incompatible pointer type” out of GCC. Harmless.
Similarly, archiving warning messages like the following are not
a problem:
ar: filename GlaIOMonad__1_2s.o truncated to GlaIOMonad_
ar: filename GlaIOMonad__2_2s.o truncated to GlaIOMonad_
...
In compiling the compiler proper (in compiler/), you may
get an “Out of heap space” error message. These can vary with the
vagaries of different systems, it seems. The solution is simple:
If you're compiling with GHC 4.00 or later, then the
maximum heap size must have been reached. This
is somewhat unlikely, since the maximum is set to 64M by default.
Anyway, you can raise it with the
-optCrts-M<size> flag (add this flag to
<module>_HC_OPTSmake variable in the appropriate
Makefile).
For GHC < 4.00, add a suitable -H flag to the Makefile, as
above.
and try again: gmake. (see Section 8.6 for information about
<module>_HC_OPTS.)
Alternatively, just cut to the chase:
% cd ghc/compiler
% make EXTRA_HC_OPTS=-optCrts-M128M
If you try to compile some Haskell, and you get errors from GCC about
lots of things from /usr/include/math.h, then your GCC was
mis-installed. fixincludes wasn't run when it should've been.
As fixincludes is now automagically run as part of GCC installation,
this bug also suggests that you have an old GCC.
You may need to re-ranlib your libraries (on Sun4s).
% cd $(libdir)/ghc-x.xx/sparc-sun-sunos4
% foreach i ( `find . -name '*.a' -print` ) # or other-shell equiv...
? ranlib $i
? # or, on some machines: ar s $i
? end
We'd be interested to know if this is still necessary.
GHC's sources go through cpp before being compiled, and cpp varies
a bit from one Unix to another. One particular gotcha is macro calls
like this:
SLIT("Hello, world")
Some cpps treat the comma inside the string as separating two macro
arguments, so you get
:731: macro `SLIT' used with too many (2) args
Alas, cpp doesn't tell you the offending file!
Workaround: don't put weird things in string args to cpp macros.