Hi all, I have managed to debug this issue.
The problem is that upstream ships a file src/Language/JavaScript/Parser/Lexer.hs that was generated by the alex lexer generator. However, compiling alex generated files on big endian systems (like powerpc) requires the BangPatterns LANGUAGE pragma. The reason we don't see this elsewhere is that other projects ship the alex source and Debian's alex is patched to fix this. Unfortunately I was never able to push that patch upstream [0], but maybe its time to try again with a slightly different version of the patch. That brings us to the language-javascript problem. Firstly, we should really ask upstream to ship the Lexer.x file from which the Lexer.hs file is generated. However the reason they reason they ship the haskell source rather than the lexer source is so that its possible to install language-javascript using "cabal install". Cabal has one rather severe limitation, it cannot reliably install build tools like alex. Firstly there is no way to specify a dependency on a build tool, secondly cabal install will install it by default in $HOME/.cabal/bin/ and if that is not on the user's PATH, language-javascript will not compile. Cheers, Erik [0] http://trac.haskell.org/haskell-platform/ticket/171 -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Erik de Castro Lopo http://www.mega-nerd.com/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org