[wbhart]

After three hours of trying to install this with GHC 6.12.1 and GHC 7.0.3 I have given up.

The problem isn't with berp .cabal files but with dependencies of berp.

ghc-7.0.3 requires containers ==0.4.0.0 language-python requires containers ==0.3.0.0

ghc-6.12.1 requires directory ==1.0.1.0 language-python requires directory ==1.0.1.2

Fetching and unpacking language-python and changing the dependencies manually doesn't appear to fix the problem, for reasons I do not understand.

[wbhart]

There is a workaround for the issues with language-python. One can do:

cabal fetch language-python cabal unpack language-python edit the language-python.cabal file updating the containers dependency to 0.4.0.0 then change the version number of language-python itself to 0.3.3 cabal configure cabal install

However, this will not fix the more obtuse problem:

Warning: This package indirectly depends on multiple versions of the same package. This is highly likely to cause a compile failure. package haskell98-1.1.0.1 requires process-1.0.1.5 package ghc-7.0.3 requires process-1.0.1.5 package Cabal-1.10.1.0 requires process-1.0.1.5 package berpinterpreter-0.0.3 requires process-1.0.1.5

I believe the only solution for this problem is to rebuild the entire Haskell platform from source, and if that fails, to format and reload the entire machine.

But you know, keep voting this thread up because Hackhell is awesome.

[wbhart]

I finally got it to build, after rebuilding most of Haskell.

It crashes on just about everything. Even a simple "for" loop defeats it. So one has to replace all of those with while blocks.

Every single one of the Python benchmarks I have previously written fails with a not implemented error.

On the one trivial example I timed which worked it was about 1000 times slower than Python.

[Symmetry]

This sounds sadly like my experiences trying to get the Yi editor to install. I love Haskell in theory, but the build system is so painful if you aren't an expert!

[exDM69]

The same can be said about Ruby, except that my experiences with Ruby are worse than with Haskell. With Haskell, you can get a pretty nice "batteries included" setup by installing the latest Haskell platform package.

With Ruby, you have to learn to use rvm, bundler and whatnot just to get a recent version of Ruby installed. Many distributions ship with quite old versions of Ruby and the Ruby official release tarballs have been unreliable (version number doesn't change, tarball contents does, etc).

Lots of languages seem to suffer from similar problems.

[Peaker]

When you "cabal unpack language-python" and fix the dependencies, make sure you boost its minor version number (e.g: from: 1.0.3 to 1.0.3.1), otherwise cabal-install will ignore your custom install of the package and will revert to the one from the repositories.

cabal-install is a big hurdle -- must be improved for faster Haskell adoption.