Darcs, FreeBSD and AMD64. Happier Together.
In a previous article I wrote about a possible way to run darcs on the FreeBSD/AMD64 platform.
Sadly, it didn’t work. It nearly worked, but it did not. It’s possible the fix was simple, but I don’t know a single line of Haskell, so I didn’t bother trying.
What I did try, was the FreeBSD Linuxulator.
options COMPAT_LINUX32
and then downloaded the latest Statically linked binary for Linux/i386 from the Darcs website.
Put the darcs executable in /usr/local/bin (or wherever you prefer) then make sure FreeBSD knows what kind of executable it is by running the following:
brandelf -t Linux /usr/local/bin/darcs
Reboot and voilà! Working darcs, that seems to function not only with a small test repository, but with large, complex production repositories.
So yes, BSD-Heads, Linux is good for something after all. And yes, we are aware that this is a filthy solution, but our attempt to successfully port GHC to FreeBSD/amd64 was abandoned after it became clear that it would be very time-consuming for us, and likely very simple for somebody more familiar with the GHC build process.