Tim's journal

Well, this is a bit of a break from the usual kinds of rants here, but I couldn't find anything online from anyone who has done this. Maybe no one else has a PowerPC Mac anymore.

Should you need to install the current version of the Haskell Platform (version 2.0.0) on a PowerPC Mac running Mac OS 10.5.8 (no guarantees that it'll work on other versions) that has no pre-installed version of GHC, here's what you need to do:

1. Install XCode 3.1 if you don't have it. To do this, you need an account at http://developer.apple.com which is free, but asks a lot of annoying questions. Give wrong answers if possible. The actual link to download XCode 3.1 for PPC is somewhere on the site (at least as of 1/15/2011), but requires a lot of digging -- or you could just google.
   
2. Download the binary bundle for GHC 6.10.4 at http://haskell.org/ghc/download_ghc_6_10_4#macosxppc -- there is also a binary bundle for GHC 7.0.1, but the Haskell Platform 2.0.0 won't build with GHC 7.0.1, only with GHC 6.12.3. (I tried.) There are no PPC binary bundles for anything greater than 6.10.4 and less than 7.0.1 AFAICT.
   
3. Install the binary bundle. The included instructions are fine.
   
4. The Haskell Platform requires GHC 6.12.3 to build. So now you'll build 6.12.3 from source using the copy of GHC 6.10.4 that you just installed. Download the source tarball at http://haskell.org/ghc/download_ghc_6_12_3#sources and follow the instructions.
   
5. The build may fail with a linker error. But that's okay! It's the stage2 build that fails, and you only need the stage1 build to bootstrap GHC. Set up your PATH so that $FOO/inplace/bin/ comes first -- where $FOO is the top-level directory for your GHC 6.12.3 build.
   
6. Download the Haskell Platform source tarball from http://hackage.haskell.org/platform/mac.html -- but instead of just doing ./configure, do ./configure --with-ghc=$FOO/inplace/bin/ghc-stage1 --with-ghc-pkg=$FOO/inplace/bin/ghc-pkg. After that, you should be able to do make; make install like it says.
   

(I'm writing some of these commands from memory. YMMV.)

It's just that easy!