[m-users.] installing Mercury on Ubuntu

[Paul Bone]

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