Enjoying GuixSD

[Brian Woodcox <bw@inskydata.com>]

I have been playing around with guix on the guixSD system.

I think Ludovic showed an example of doing this with petsc, so I thought I would give it a go with Haskell.  It worked out great!

So, I decided to pull down the Haskell ghc source code from master on github and compile it in an environment.

Set up the environment with —> guix environment ghc —ad-hoc ghc@8.4.3

I had to install a few packages:

guix package -i libgmp
guix package -i ncurses
etc..


I had to unset GHC_PACKAGE_PATH
PATH=“$HOME/.cabal/bin:$PATH”  ## Needed otherwise cabal complains about the wrong version of happy.  I probably should have used a sandbox for the cabal stuff or possibly a container.

cabal install alex happy

python3 boot

./configure —with-gmp-includes=/gnu/store/rilw7541pgdz10sabki897961ymin625-profile/include —with-gmp-libraries=/gnu/store/rilw7541pgdz10sabki897961ymin625-profile/lib —with-curses-libraries=/gnu/store/rilw7541pgdz10sabki897961ymin625-profile/lib

./configure
make

So after a while building this, I end up with ghc-stage2 and other executables in my inplace/bin folder.

I run ./ghc-stage2 —interactive

and I get

GHCi, version 8.7.20181108: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/  :? for help

Big success.  I love the fact that I can setup an environment and do this sort of thing.

I might try this with a container next and then move on to guile and try building and compiling packages the guix way.

P.S.  If anyone feels energetic and has the time, it would be nice to have a recipe to install the VirtualBox Guest Additions into GuixSD.  Then I can get copy and paste to work. :)