What is "ghc" and why was it installed?

[Clemens Lang]

On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 04:08:25AM +0000, Fielding, Eric J (US 329A) via macports-users wrote:
> I was running “port selfupdate” and “port upgrade outdated” for the
> first time in a while, and I noticed that my Intel MacBook Pro was
> spending almost an hour compiling a port called “ghc” that I don’t
> remember seeing before and I am sure I did not request. Is this part
> of something else that was added recently that is now a dependency of
> some other port?

The most common ports that depend on GHC are pandoc and shellcheck. My
guess is that you're on Monterey, where pandoc currently fails to build
because GHC fails to build.

See https://ports.macports.org/port/pandoc/details/, which shows the
failure on the right side. The build of pandoc on our buildbot [1]
failed, so the buildbot did not produce a pre-compiled binary.
Previously, you likely downloaded the precompiled binary and avoided the
GHC dependency.

The build of GHC that previously failed is [2] (WARNING, that's an 8 MiB
text file over a slow connection). The first error in that build is

  x ./opt/local/lib/ghc-9.4.4/lib/x86_64-osx-ghc-9.4.4/libHSCabal-syntax-3.8.1.0-ghc9.4.4.dylib: Cannot restore xattr: com.apple.ResourceFork at 592512 pos 65536 bytes: No space left on device

i.e. our build machine ran out of disk space. I'm adding Ryan to Cc, who
maintains our build infrastructure. Maybe there's some regular cleanup
we can run.

Meanwhile, I'll see if I can re-trigger the build of GHC and eventually
pandoc to fix this.


[1]: https://build.macports.org/builders/ports-12_x86_64-builder/builds/55400/steps/install-dependencies/logs/stdio
[2]: https://build.macports.org/builders/ports-12_x86_64-builder/builds/54550/steps/install-port/logs/stdio/text


HTH,
Clemens