1. Installation

It follows a brief discussion of the installation from source. There is, however, a file INSTALL in the source distribution, which is more frequently updated and should be consulted in any case.

1.1 Where is the Source?

The master site of C->Haskell is at http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~chak/haskell/c2hs/. It has all the latest information and sources. Furthermore, it explains how to get anonymous CVS access to C->Haskell's repository and may have pre-compiled binaries for easier installation.

1.2 What Else Do I Need?

You need a Haskell system supported by C->Haskell. Currently this is only the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC), which you can obtain from http://haskell.org/ghc/. You need a fairly recent version of the Haskell compiler. C->Haskell uses a compiler support library called the Compiler Toolkit. In the main distribution, the Compiler Toolkit is already contained in the source tar ball -- be sure to download a file named c2hs-x.y.z.tar.gz, were x.y.z is the version number of the package.

To build the documentation, you will also need the SGML Tools, which you find at your nearest sunsite or Linux mirror or at ftp://ftp.lip6.fr/pub/sgml-tools/. On an up-to-date Linux system, the tools are probably already installed.

1.3 I Got Everything, and Now?

The short answer is

% gzip -cd c2hs.X.Y.Z.tar.gz | tar xvf -  # unpack the sources
% cd c2hs.X.Y.Z                           # change to the toplevel directory
% ./configure                             # run the `configure' script
% make                                    # build everything
[ Become root if necessary ]
% make install                            # install the tool

In the INSTALL file, there are more details.

Optionally, you can build the documentation by issuing make doc.

1.4 Packages

If you are using GHC, you may want to register C->Haskell's support libraries as a package. This can be achieved in two ways. Firstly, if you pass the option --enable-add-package to configure, the build system will register the package for you when you execute make install. Alternatively, the configuration oracle c2hs-conf, which is installed as part of the C->Haskell distribution, produces a package configuration suitable for the package tool ghc-pkg when given the option --package-conf. In short, you can register the libraries after installation by invoking

c2hs-conf --package-conf | ghc-pkg --add-package