ghc-android

Build script for building ghc cross compilers targeting Android. This script wraps up all the hacks and tweaks that are currently needed to get a working ghc android crosscompiler. It will download the Android NDK, the iconv library, the ncurses library and GHC itself as required. If you already have the Android NDK you can put it in the tarfiles directory and the build script will reuse it. If you already have a ghc clone, you can use the mirror script to avoid doing a full re-download during cloning.

Before starting a build you will need a working gcc, git, happy, alex and (at least for arm builds) llvm-3.2 on the build host. You will also need enough 32 bit support to run the Android NDK compiler. Usually just glibc, libstdc++ and zlib should be enough.

To build a ghc-android compiler execute:

./build

By default this should give you a android-14 arm-linux-androideabi-4.7 compiler at:

~/.ghc/android-14/arm-linux-androideabi-4.7/bin

Add this directory to your PATH to use the cross compiler with the full target prefix.

Or add:

~/.ghc/android-14/arm-linux-androideabi-4.7/arm-linux-androideabi/bin

to your PATH to use it without prefixes. There is also a cabal wrapper script in this directory that will cross compile packages with cable and add them to the ghc package-db.

You can change various variables via the environment to give you other configurations.

There is also a pre-configured x86 variation you can build like this:

./build --x86

If you want to build more than one configuration it is worth building a local mirror repo to speed up subsequent ghc clones. To build a mirror run:

./mirror {path to existing ghc clone}

During ./build the GHC repo is cloned into appropriate path, e.g.:

./build-android-14-arm-linux-androideabi-4.7/ghc

So the mirror path can become this:

./mirror build-android-14-arm-linux-androideabi-4.7/ghc

This will build a mirror that will automatically be used by the build script to speed up cloning.

The following configurations have been tested on an up-to-date Arch Linux install and are known to work:

* ghc-android-14-arm-linux-androideabi-4.7
* ghc-android-14-x86-4.7

Comments, patches and success reports are welcome.

tested working build with Debian stable

Running these commands will make a Debian stable chroot and build in there.

debootstrap --arch=i386 stable debian-stable-android
chroot debian-stable-android

mount -t proc proc /proc
echo "deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian stable main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
apt-get update
apt-get -y install build-essential ghc git libncurses5-dev cabal-install
apt-get -y install llvm-3.0 # not 3.1; buggy on arm. 3.2 is ok too
apt-get -y install ca-certificates curl file m4 autoconf zlib1g-dev
apt-get -y install libgnutls-dev libxml2-dev libgsasl7-dev pkg-config
apt-get -y install python c2hs
wget http://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian/20130903T155330Z/pool/main/a/automake-1.14/automake_1.14-1_all.deb
dpkg -i automake*.deb
rm *.deb
adduser androidbuilder
su androidbuilder

cd
rm -rf .ghc .cabal
cabal update
cabal install happy alex --bindir=$HOME/bin
PATH=$HOME/bin:$PATH
export PATH
git clone https://github.com/joeyh/ghc-android
cd ghc-android
git checkout stable-ghc-snapshot
./build