installing git annex on sl5

linux / git-annex

I was waiting for my backups to be done hence this post, as I was using git-annex to manage my files and I decided I needed to have git-annex on a SL5 based machine. SL5 is just an opensource clone/recompile of RHEL5.

I haven’t tried to install the newer versions of Haskell Platform and GHC in a while on SL5 to instal git-annex. But the last time I checked when GHC7 was out, it was a pain to install GHC on SL5.

However I have discovered that someone has gone through the trouble of packaging up GHC and Haskell Platform for RHEL based distros.

I’m primarily interested in installing git-annex on SL5 based systems. The installation process goes as such…

First install GHC and Haskell Platform (you need root for these following steps)

$ wget http://sherkin.justhub.org/el5/RPMS/x86_64/justhub-release-2.0-4.0.el5.x86_64.rpm
$ rpm -ivh justhub-release-2.0-4.0.el5.x86_64.rpm
$ yum install haskell

The RPM’s don’t place the files in /usr/bin, so you must add the following to your .bashrc (from here on you don’t need root if you don’t want things to be system wide)

$ export PATH=/usr/hs/bin:$PATH

On SL5 pcre is at version 6.6 which is far too old for one of the dependancies that git-annex requires. Therefore the user must install an updated version of pcre either from source or another method, I chose to install it from source and by hand into /usr/local

$ wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/pcre/files/pcre/8.30/pcre-8.30.tar.gz/download
$ tar zxvf pcre-8.30.tar.gz
$ cd pcre-8.30
$ ./configure
$ make && make install

Once the packages are installed and are in your execution path, using cabal to configure and build git-annex just makes life easier, it should install all the needed dependancies.

$ cabal update
$ cabal install pcre-light --extra-include-dirs=/usr/local/include
$ git clone git://git.kitenet.net/git-annex
$ cd git-annex
$ make git-annex.1
$ cabal configure
$ cabal build
$ cabal install

Or if you want to install it globallly for everyone (otherwise it will get installed into $HOME/.cabal/bin)

$ cabal install --global

The above will take a while to compile and install the needed dependancies. I would suggest any user who does should run the tests that comes with git-annex to make sure everything is functioning as expected.

I wonder if it’s possible to get git-annex as a back-end driver for some of the digital preservation systems out there. Or more interestingly can fedora-commons be used a special remote or back-end for git-annex.

I haven’t had a chance or need to install git-annex on a SL6 based system yet, but I would assume something similar to the above steps would be required to do so.

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