Running Elm on FreeBSD

I work primarily on FreeBSD these days, which makes it a bit difficult to play with Elm. I’ve cobbled together builds in the past, but not in a very systematic way. This week I finally sat down to set up repeatable builds–including sandboxed installations of old versions of GHC and cabal–and produce a binary package for installation. The repo is at https://bitbucket.org/psagers/elm-freebsd, so if you’re looking for FreeBSD support, this should get you going.

Ideally, this would eventually be levered into a proper FreeBSD port, but I haven’t tried to tackle that yet. The install prefix is configurable, so in principle it would be easy to produce npm-compatible binaries with this. If anyone with a commit bit would like to pursue that, let me know. Note, however, that FreeBSD releases a new major version every two years or so and they are explicitly not ABI-compatible with each other. So Elm’s current ship-one-binary-and-declare-victory-forever distribution strategy would need to be elaborated a little.

(Come to think of it, that point may be relevant to Linux as well. Is it only a matter of time before a major distribution takes a new version of libgmp or some other elm dependency and comedy ensues? An issue for another day, perhaps.)

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