cabal install pandoc fails due to linker errors with regex-pcre-builtin

[jsw-fnal]

I am attempting to install pandoc on an RHEL5 machine, and I think that I am very close. However, cabal install pandoc fails, reporting lots of linker errors (e.g. undefined reference to _pcre_utf8_table1) just after the output:

Linking dist/build/pandoc/pandoc ...

The linker errors are all coming from the regex-pcre-builtin library (version 0.94.4.8.8.35). I have run cabal update and cabal install --reinstall --force-reinstalls regex-pcre-builtin hightlighting-kate pandoc, to no avail. I've also manually installed the PCRE C library, just in case it was looking for symbols there. Any ideas?

[mpickering]

Please can you post the full log from the install.

[jsw-fnal]

I put the log into a gist.

[mpickering]

Note that highlighting-kate is the package that uses this library,
so first try reinstalling it:

cabal install --reinstall --force highlighting-kate pandoc

If it fails, as a workaround, you might try

cabal install --reinstall --force highlighting-kate pandoc -fpcre-light

This will cause the pcre-light library to be used instead of
regex-pcre-builtin. This requires that you have the C library pcre
installed on your system, which you can do via your package manager.

There is some more information in this thread about the problem if that doesn't work.

[jsw-fnal]

Well well! Using -fpcre-light after installing the C library pcre seems to have succeeded. (I had already tried force-reinstalling both highlighting-kate and regex-pcre-builtin without affecting the problem.) Do you have any idea why this happened? Are there changes to pandoc's dependencies that could be made to avoid this problem for future users?

[jgm]

Well, it's baffling, because I can't reproduce the problem. If you try again with

cabal install --flags "-pcre-light" regex-pcre-builtin highlighting-kate pandoc

does it work?

[jsw-fnal]

This (a conda recipe) was what eventually worked:

$ cat pandoc/build.sh 
#!/bin/bash

export LANG="en_US.UTF8"

cabal sandbox init || exit 1
cabal update || exit 2
cabal install -j4 --prefix="$PREFIX" --flags="-support_aesni" cipher-aes || exit 3
cabal install -j4 --prefix="$PREFIX" -fembed_data_files -fpcre-light highlighting-kate --reinstall --extra-lib-dirs="$PREFIX/lib" --extra-include-dirs="$PREFIX/include" || exit 4
cabal install -j4 --prefix="$PREFIX" -fembed_data_files pandoc-1.12.4.2 || exit 5

And, while the sandbox feature is really quite nice, it is not airtight, since it still creates a directory under $HOME and fills it with hundreds of megabytes of package files...