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Haskell, GHC and --hash-size=31

A few nights back I decided to return to an on-going self-education project in Haskell and much to my dismay, when I issued the "ghc --make ..." utterance it failed to complete and instead gave me the error: 

$ ghc --make hwtest.hs

Linking hwtest ...
/usr/bin/ld: --hash-size=31: unknown option
usr/bin/ld: use the --help option for usage information
collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status

WTF? When did my linker system or GHC break when I wasn't looking?

After two unsuccessful postings to the Haskell beginners newsgroup (unsuccessful as in they appeared not to have made it through the inter-web) I gave up and dug a little harder and turned up this post on the web:

http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/cvs-ghc/2011-November/068562.html

Bingo. I remedied the situation by performing this from the command line: 

sudo apt-get remove binutils-gold

I didn't even know I had this package but then I suddenly remembered that a few nights previous and had found yet another "interesting thing" to play with and I remembered cutting and pasting a couple of lines of bash installation script and sure enough, checking my bash history revealed that at the end of a very long line (too wide to fully see in the browser) was the mysterious binutils-gold package.

So, there you go... from now I will be a little more discerning about what I am cutting and pasting during a grazing session.

Hope that helps somebody else out too!

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