What is "ghc" and why was it installed?

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Jan 18, 2023, at 17:31, Clemens Lang wrote:
> 
> 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 I was running “port selfupdate” and “port upgrade outdated” for the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

The re-attempt that you triggered completed successfully.

The machine has 15 GB available usually. This is less than I would like but there isn't anything taking up unnecessary space. Xcode just continues its yearly quest to use up all disk space everywhere. I should probably have allocated a bit more disk space to this VM when I set it up but I didn't.