[m-users.] installing Mercury on Ubuntu

[nll at dent.vctlabs.com]

Hello Paul and all,

I included the original message and responded to all.  I do not know if 
that was the right thing to do.  Please let me know if I have blundered.

Yes, Gentoo uses source builds for most installs.  There are some binary 
builds available.  Firefox is an example.  It will not build on my Gentoo 
computer, because the load takes too much disk space.  Firefox also takes 
a long time to compile.  Mercury did take quite a while to compile, 
because of all the grades.

The source that I downloaded was a development snapshot for 14.01.  I see 
that you have moved on to 14.02.  At the time I was thinking that it 
might be of interest to the developers to have an instance running on 
Ubuntu.  However, as you see, I did not get it installed in a timely 
mmanner, so I suppose that concept may have been overcome by events. 
Anyway thanks for your propmt responses, and I will try to figure out what 
to do. 
If a snapshot is a git release, perhaps I need to download the regular 
release of 14.02 instead.


Nick Lockwood



  On Tue, 23 Jun 2015, Paul Bone wrote:

> On Mon, Jun 22, 2015 at 01:36:13PM -0700, nll at dent.vctlabs.com wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> I trust this is the right list for this question and I hope someone can give
>> me guidance.
>>
>> I have installed Mercury on a computer running  Gentoo Linux.  This was not
>> hard because Gentoo has prepared an install.  I also have an Ubuntu computer
>> supplied by my company, and wish to install Mercury there also. I have not
>> found a place to acquire a standard Ubuntu install (really a Debian, I
>> guess) for Mercury.  I have acquired a source package, but in reading about
>> installation bootstrapping was mentioned, and it appears that an existing
>> Mercury installation is required in order to compile Mercury.  I see that
>> the Mercury compiler has much Mercury code, so I suppose that is why an
>> existing installation is required.
>
> The source packages do contain Mercury code, however they also contain
> pre-compiled C code.  So only only need a C compiler, GNU make and a few
> other things (the build-essential package has most things).
>
> Mercury installation can take a long time, you probably experienced this
> with the Gentoo package (does Gentoo still use only source packages?).  Many
> new users are annoyed by this and so I suggest using the
> --enable-minimal-install configuration option.  You will get a working
> version of Mercury sooner but it may be missing features such as debugging,
> profiling or support for other language backends.
>
>
> If you were to build from a git checkout then you would need to already have
> a version of Mercury working.  More information about bootstrapping is here:
> https://github.com/Mercury-Language/mercury/blob/master/README.bootstrap
>
>
> Please let us know if you have any more questions.
>
> I noticed that you did not subscribe to the mailing list, I've "allowed"
> your message and invited you to subscribe.
>
>
> -- 
> Paul Bone
> http://www.bone.id.au
>