Basic installation errors due to missing build tools

[porkedrons[at]gmail.com]

I can not compile Haskell plataform in openSUSE-11.1-i586 console output:

dhcppc2:/home/opensuse/Desktop/haskell-platform-2009.2.0.2 # whoami root

dhcppc2:/home/opensuse/Desktop/haskell-platform-2009.2.0.2 # ls aclocal.m4 autom4te.cache configure configure.ac Makefile packages scripts

dhcppc2:/home/opensuse/Desktop/haskell-platform-2009.2.0.2 # ./configure checking build system type... Invalid configuration i686-pc-linux-': machine i686-pc-linux' not recognized configure: error: /bin/sh scripts/config.sub i686-pc-linux- failed

dhcppc2:/home/opensuse/Desktop/haskell-platform-2009.2.0.2 #

Thanks for your time

[matthijs]

I've seen a similar error:

user@haskell:/tmp/haskell-platform-2009.2.0.2$ ./configure
checking build system type... Invalid configuration `i686-pc-linux-oldld': 
  machine `i686-pc-linux' not recognized
configure: error: /bin/sh scripts/config.sub i686-pc-linux-oldld failed

The -oldld here seems to be caused by the fact that I have no ld installed (so it cannot generate elf or a.out, so it is "old"). Installing binutils gives me the same error as the original report, config.guess then thinks my architecture is i686-pc-linux-. The problem here is that config.sub cannot handle an architecture with more than three dashes properly. Somewhere at the top, it splits the architecture into $os and $basic_machine by taking everything after the final dash, so -linux ends up in $basic_machine, which causes it to error out.

Installing the Debian binutils package fixes my problem: config.guess then returns i686-pc-linux-gnu. Since config.sub has a special case for -linux-gnu, it splits this properly and configure works.

I think the above captures the problem pretty nicely: configure does not work when no build utilities are installed. I'm not sure whose fault this is exactly or how to fix it...

This is slightly related to GHC ticket #3612, describing that GHC does not build without build utils either (though because of completely different reasons).

[dons]

Need to somehow tell people what build utils they need.