Document static compilation (was: Static compile support for AWS Linux (Redhat/CentOS))

[chadbrewbaker]

If you are compiling for AWS Lambda you have to statically link everything, i.e. stack ghc Foo.hs -threaded -static -optl-static

This requires static versions of libffi, glibc, libgmp, ... finally got it working but it was a pain. Could really use support for static compiles out of the box in stack.

[snoyberg]

Can you list the steps you initially took and the error message you received?

[snoyberg]

Also, the steps you used to resolve the problem would be very useful too.

[rvion]

some people including myself would love to have a simple --static argument to easilly produce an as-static-as-possible executable

[chadbrewbaker]

I used the compile flags above. Had to use straight GHC since something broke inside Stack on the Redhat 7 install. If you run ldd a.out you get a list of dynamic libs you have to bring in. For each I went to there project page, downloaded them and did the ./configure;make; sudo make install .

[snoyberg]

@chadbrewbaker As mentioned above, I'll need to see the error messages generated. And how did you get the stack binary in the first place? What changes are you asking be made (changes to the RPM, for example?). I'm still missing information on this.

[chadbrewbaker]

Stack does not install both static and dynamic versions of all pre-compiled
libraries. You need static linking when deploying to machines with none of
the dynamic libs installed. I will detail my latest Stack on AWS Linux
install issue in another ticket as that problem is orthogonal.

On Sat, Sep 26, 2015 at 11:25 PM, Michael Snoyman notifications@github.com
wrote:

@chadbrewbaker https://github.com/chadbrewbaker As mentioned above,
I'll need to see the error messages generated. And how did you get the
stack binary in the first place? What changes are you asking be made
(changes to the RPM, for example?). I'm still missing information on this.

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#1032 (comment)
.

[snoyberg]

Maybe I just don't have enough experience with Redhat, but this issue still isn't clear to me. Can you clarify what you mean by "pre-compiled libraries," for instance? Is this Haskell libraries, system libraries, etc?

[chadbrewbaker]

/usr/lib type libraries. To statically link you need libfoo.a, not libfoo.so or libfoo.dylib. If libfoo.a doesn't exist you either have to find a libfoo-static package, or download the libfoo source and compile it yourself as a static library.

[snoyberg]

If you'd like to send a PR to modify the rpms to include the relevant
system libraries, we can probably include that (assuming it doesn't
drastically increase the download size). Short of that, I'm not really sure
what changes stack can make for this.

On Thu, Oct 1, 2015, 2:37 PM Chad Brewbaker notifications@github.com
wrote:

/usr/lib type libraries. To statically link you need libfoo.a, not
libfoo.so or libfoo.dylib. If libfoo.a doesn't exist you either have to
find a libfoo-static package, or download the libfoo source and compile it
yourself as a static library.

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#1032 (comment)
.

[borsboom]

I'm not quite clear. Stack doesn't install any libraries in /usr/lib. The distro packages (RPMs/.Debs) do list minimal dependencies so that regular Stack functionality works, but I don't know that we should extend the dependencies to cover every possible use case. RPMs don't seem to support recommended vs. required dependencies the way Debian packages packages do either so we can't just add them to a recommended/suggested list in the case of CentOS/RHEL/Amazon. We've already more-or-less decided that "configuration management" (e.g. installing system libs) is out of scope for Stack, much as we'd all love for Stack to do everything.

At minimum, though, it's certainly worth documenting what is required to build static binaries.

[chadbrewbaker]

I don't disagree. I'll write a bash script this weekend that pulls down other needed packages and builds a static hello world for AWS Lambda then make a pull request to the docs.