Building darcs

The Easy Way

If your distribution provides a pre-built binary package of a recent Darcs release, you are strongly encouraged to use that rather than building Darcs yourself.

If you have (or can install) the cabal-install package, this is the next best option, as this will resolve build dependencies automatically. To download, compile and install Darcs and its dependencies via cabal-install, simply run

cabal update
cabal install darcs

The Hard Way

If you cannot install cabal-install, you need to run

ghc --make Setup
./Setup configure
./Setup build
./Setup install

This will require the following build dependencies:

• GHC 6.6 or higher (6.8 or higher recommended); and
• Cabal 1.6 or higher.

Additional build dependencies are declared in the darcs.cabal file, and ./Setup configure will tell you if any required build dependencies aren't found. The build dependencies at time of writing (Darcs 2.2) are as follows:

• the C library zlib;
• the Haskell packages
  • array 1.1 or 1.2;
  • containers 1.1 or 1.2;
  • directory 1.0;
  • filepath 1.1;
  • html 1.0;
  • mtl 1.1;
  • old-time 1.0;
  • parsec 2.1;
  • process 1.0;
  • random 1.0; and
  • regex-compat between 0.71 and 0.92, inclusive.

Missing optional build dependencies are only listed if ./Setup configure is passed the -verbose argument. At time of writing they are:

• the C library libcurl (7.19.1 or higher recommended);
• the Haskell packages
  • bytestring 0.9;
  • bytestring-mmap 0.2 or higher;
  • http 3000;
  • network 2.2;
  • terminfo 0.3.
  • utf8-string 0.3; and
  • zlib 0.5.

The Old Way

Darcs can still be built with GNU autotools; this approach is deprecated and will be removed after the 2.3 release. Run

autoconf
./configure
make
make install

The build dependencies are identical to the previous approach, except that instead of the Cabal package, you will need

• GNU Make; and
• GNU autoconf 2.50 or higher.