Zero to GHC development in an Ubuntu VM in 19 lines of Bash

If you're like me, you want to contribute to GHC and even have a few small tasks in mind, but since you're an occasional contributor you don't pull, build, and validate it every day. Thus when you come back to it periodically, getting it validating again can be a chore. For example, most recently it failed on my RHEL 6 work machine and Mac OS 10.8 laptop, but worked on my Ubuntu machine.

Given the complexity and fragility of the process, it would be good for us to have more standardized (hermetic) environments so that people can (1) get started easily and (2) reproduce eachother's build outcomes.

The idea of using a VM image for this purpose was discussed back in 2009. But it seems not to have happened. To get things moving in this direction, I came up with a script that bootstraps a working GHC development repository inside a VirtualBox VM running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (either server or desktop worked for me).

The following Bash script is all there is to it:

	#!/bin/bash
	set -e
	set -x
	sudo apt-get install -y git gcc make autoconf libtool zlib1g-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libglu1-mesa libglu1-mesa-dev freeglut3-dev libncurses-dev libgmp-dev
	export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/
	sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgmp.so.10 /usr/lib/libgmp.so.3
	sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgmp.so.10 /usr/lib/libgmp.so
	wget http://www.haskell.org/ghc/dist/7.6.3/ghc-7.6.3-x86_64-unknown-linux.tar.bz2
	tar xjvf ghc-7.6.3-x86_64-unknown-linux.tar.bz2
	cd ghc-7.6.3
	./configure && sudo make install
	cd ..
	wget http://lambda.haskell.org/platform/download/2013.2.0.0/haskell-platform-2013.2.0.0.tar.gz
	tar xzvf haskell-platform-2013.2.0.0.tar.gz
	cd haskell-platform-2013.2.0.0
	./configure && make && sudo make install
	sudo chmod ugo+rX -R /usr/local
	cd $HOME
	git clone git://github.com/ghc/ghc ghc-working
	cd ghc-working
	./sync-all --testsuite -r git://github.com/ghc get
	time sh validate

view raw bootstrap_ghc_dev.sh hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Once I figure out how to shrink down an Ubuntu VM to a reasonable size I'll post a VM for download, or publish an Amazon Machine Image (AMI). Or, if someone knows Chef and would like to help me convert the above to a Chef recipe, that would be better than a bash script.