Cannot cabal install hs3 (for haskell-supercollider)

(Ubuntu 12.04)

Hello! I'm trying to get hs3 installed to my haskell platform so that I can use the haskore-supercollider package (it's a required dependency). However, when I attempt cabal install, it crashes on the some files I believe to be related to hosc. Here's a text readout of the error:

Sound/SC3/UGen/Help.hs:26:46: Not in scope: `lookupEnv' cabal: Error: some packages failed to install: hsc3-0.15 failed during the building phase. The exception was: ExitFailure 1

I've attempted a number of things including updating cabal, reinstalling hosc, and throwing some flags on the install, or getting the install from a different source (slavepianos.org). Still though, I keep getting the same error. Here's an image of the error for reference:

https://i.sstatic.net/dGEKx.png

Thanks for your help!

Solution

You appear to have reached "Cabal Hell".

It looks to me like hsc3 for versions later than 0.13 depends on GHC being at least version 7.6 (the version which added the lookupEnv function), while Ubuntu 12.0.4 provides 7.4. This shows up as a compilation error because hsc3 has a badly set version bound on the base package.

You might try either of:

Installing a later version of GHC. It's currently at 7.8 with 7.10 expected out next month.
Using the older haskore-supercollider version 0.2, which uses hsc3 0.13. (Alas, when I try this with --dry-run, cabal fails to find an installation plan, but perhaps it works better if you actually have GHC 7.4.)