Compiling DisTract

Compiling DisTract requires that you have a Haskell compiler on your system. GHC 6.6.1 is known to work and is the recommended compiler. Your mileage may vary with other compilers.

You will need the following external Haskell libraries:

• filepath >= 1.0
  filepath is now part of GHC and is included in GHC from version 6.6.1 onwards. If you have GHC 6.6.1 or greater then there's nothing else to do. Otherwise, the easiest thing is to use the Debian package libghc6-filepath-dev. If you're not running Debian then try the filepath homepage.
• chunks >= 2007.4.18 http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/chunks-2007.4.18
• hinstaller >= 2007.5.13 http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/hinstaller-2007.5.13

Note: versions of DisTract before 0.2.4 also required parsedate >= 2006.11.10 http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/parsedate-2006.11.10. This is no longer required from 0.2.4 and onwards.

Then you should be able to:

• cd distract/haskell
• runghc Setup.hs configure
• runghc Setup.hs build

This has been tested on both 32-bit and 64-bit Debian Linux systems. I see no reason why it shouldn't work on OS X or even Windows, but I've not tested it. If you made it compile, the file you care about is distract/haskell/dist/build/DisTractInstaller/DisTractInstaller - that's the installer. See Getting Started for how to use that! If you find that you can't compile DisTract and get some errors, please contact me and let me know.