Re: [hakyll] Installation tutorial questions and suggestions

[Jasper Van der Jeugt]

Hello Chris!

Thanks for your feedback!

I think it's weird that `cabal install hakyll` failed, and then
suddenly worked. I can think of a few reasons for this:

- cryptocipher failed to download, or the download was corrupted;
- cryptocipher-0.3.0 actually fails to build and the maintainer
uploaded a patch in the meanwhile;
- ...

But this seems like a very peculiar edge case and honestly I wouldn't
worry about it.

The $PATH suggestion is really useful. I'm not familiar with OSX
myself so I would definitely appreciate a patch! Let me know if you
need further information for this.

Peace,
Jasper

On Wed, Apr 10, 2013 at 2:56 PM, Christopher Young <ch...@chrisyoung.net> wrote:
> Hello! I'm new to Haskell and completely new to Hakyll, so I'm sure the
> glitches I encountered getting Hakyll set up are my fault, but I wondered if
> the documentation could be tweaked in one or two places a bit to aid the
> similarly clueless.
>
> I'm on OSX. I started with the Haskell platform from haskell.org, ghc
> version 7.0.4.
>
> First, I had to run cabal install hakyll more than once to get it to
> install. The first time it choked on a dependency:
>
> cabal: Error: some packages failed to install:
> cprng-aes-0.2.3 depends on cryptocipher-0.3.0 which failed to install.
> cryptocipher-0.3.0 failed during the building phase. The exception was:
> ExitFailure 1
> hakyll-4.1.4.0 depends on cryptocipher-0.3.0 which failed to install.
> http-conduit-1.8.9 depends on cryptocipher-0.3.0 which failed to install.
>
> I was surprised to find that simply running cabal install hakyll again
> resolved the problem.
>
> Suggestion #1: If this is expected or routine, does it make sense to add a
> sentence explaining that you might need to cabal install hakyll more than
> once so that people unfamiliar with the quirks of cabal won't be thrown off?
>
> The next step of the tutorial suggests that if hakyll-init mysite doesn't
> work, you should check to make sure that $HOME/.cabal/bin is on your $path.
> But although I do have a $HOME/.cabal directory, it doesn't have a bin
> directory.
>
> If I had only read the actual output of the installation process, I would
> have been fine at this point, but instead after much scrambling I resorted
> to the desperate expedient of completely reinstalling the haskell platform
> (this time ghc 4.7.2), doing cabal update first, and then cabal install
> hakyll. This time, on a completely fresh installation, I didn't have the
> dependency issue. It just worked the first time. But still no hakyll-init
> and no $HOME/.cabal/bin directory.
>
> I finally noticed that the script told me that hakyll's executable had been
> installed in $HOME/Library/Haskell/ghc-7.4.2/lib/hakyll-4.2.2.0/bin. Running
> $HOME/Library/Haskell/ghc-7.4.2/lib/hakyll-4.2.2.0/bin/hakyll-init worked
> just fine.
>
> And then after a bit of googling, I realized that the bin directory I wanted
> on my path was this: $HOME/Library/Haskell/bin
>
> So, suggestion #2: Add a line to the documentation either explaining where
> else the cabal/bin might be symlinked from (on OSX is it always
> ~/Library/Haskell/bin?) or add a line alerting the user that if they don't
> have a $HOME/.cabal/bin directory, they should keep an eye on cabal install
> hakyll output for the actual path of the executable.
>
> If anyone thinks that these suggestions make sense, just give me a hint or
> two about the stuff I'm still confused about and I'll be happy to submit a
> patch/pull request.
>
> Thanks very much in advance for any help!
>
> Best,
> Chris
>
>
>
>
>
>
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[Christopher Young]

Hello Jasper,

Apologies for not responding earlier. I mistakenly thought I was signed up for notifications if I got a response and only thought to check the group now.

I think you're right that the first issue I flagged is too obscure to need addressing. Regarding the PATH issue, I've tweaked the documentation and will submit a pull request shortly.

By the way, since writing my original note I've completed my site and deployed it [1]. Hakyll turned out to be a pleasure to use, even for someone relatively new to Haskell. So thank you very much!

[1] http://chrisyoung.net

Best,

Chris