Yi/FAQ

Installation

• How do I install Yi?

get it from Hackage. Configure, compile and install Yi as you would do for any other Cabal package.

• Setup configure fails with

Setup.hs: Package yi-0.4 can't be built on this system.

It means that you have no UI package available. You need VTY or GTK2hs installed. Get them from Hackage.

• cabal install yi fails with dependency errors, eg:

$ cabal install yi
Resolving dependencies...
cabal.exe: dependencies conflict: ghc-6.8.3 requires bytestring ==0.9.0.1.1
however
bytestring-0.9.0.1.1 was excluded because bytestring-0.9.0.1 was selected
instead
bytestring-0.9.0.1.1 was excluded because yi-0.3 requires bytestring =0.9.0.1

Try removing all your old yi packages, and do

cabal update

before attempting to install.

• cabal install -fghcAPI fails

If you want GHC API special capabilities, you have to download, configure, build and copy separately:

cd yi
cabal configure -fghcAPI
cabal build
cabal copy

• Compilation fails with a message about 'alex' not being available?

Currently, Cabal doesn't track programs, just libraries, so it won't warn you if you are missing Alex (as many people are). The solution here is to just cabal install alex first. (Yi uses Alex to generate code for parsing stuff with syntax, like Haskell source.)

• On Mac OS X if you get an error message similar to this:

yi: can't load .so/.DLL for: gthread-2.0 (dlopen(libgthread-2.0.dylib, 10): image not found)

then your dynamic library search path variable is probably not set correctly. You can set it (in Bash) using:

export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/local/lib

(Adjust the specific path to your system. You can find the right location using locate libgthread)

Development

• How do I install Yi for development?

Get it from http://code.haskell.org/yi while there are other repositories of Yi out there, this is the latest.

• What are some of the dependancies?

The development version of Yi currently requires Cabal-1.4, fingertree-0.0, and utf8-string-0.3.1.

If you are on Mac OS X and are using MacPorts, then these will not be included in the GHC in that distribution. Many of the dependancies are in MacPorts (for example: ghc, ghc-devel, alex, and gtk2hs). However, you may have some trouble building with Cabal-1.5.2, since it is a development version of Cabal. To work around these issues, you might have to add the line "Build-Type: Simple" to the .cabal files in the above required packages.

Configuration

How to Configure Yi

You can find configuration file examples in the 'examples/' directory, or online at http://code.haskell.org/yi/examples/.

A good way to start is to copy yi.hs in your ~/.yi directory (create it if needed), and hack as needed.