Using npm to install PureScript fails on Arch Linux about documentation

[ianliu]

@wsdjeg and @winksaville there is no ncurses5-compat-libs in the official Arch repository, it is an AUR package, so I don't know how @wsdjeg made it work with that command. I would suggest reopening this issue.

[winksaville]

Yep, installing ncurses5-compat-libs does make it work, as I noted in the original post. Also, I see that INSTALL.md has always stated the need for ncurses5. I'd still suggest updating Getting Started with pre-requesites or statically linking with ncurses5 as suggested by others. But because the info is in INSTALL.md I'll close this.

[hdgarrood]

Is it worth statically linking ncurses in the prebuilt binaries? That way, we wouldn't need to expand the documentation as this problem wouldn't arise in the first place.

[hdgarrood]

Incidentally we do have some docs about ncurses in INSTALL.md in the compiler repo; if we do need to change the getting started guide I'd rather just say "if you have any problems installing the compiler, go here" and link to INSTALL.md.

[winksaville]

Static linking sounds like a good idea. It would also be helpfull if the npm install didn't hang bug actually gave you an error message so you might be able to find a solution, I've installed a quite a few npm packages and this was the first time its ever hung so hopefully that can be improved.

[wsdjeg]

@winksaville Thanks for your info, after run sudo pacman -S ncurses5-compat-libs, it works.

[beiranvand-karim]

@wsdjeg and @winksaville there is no ncurses5-compat-libs in the official Arch repository, it is an AUR package, so I don't know how @wsdjeg made it work with that command. I would suggest reopening this issue.

Yeah, I have the same problem

[hdgarrood]

Does installing the ncurses5-compat-libs AUR package fix the issue?

Also, what happens with npm install -g exactly? Does it produce exactly the output given in the original issue description (and no more)? Also, when the npm package decides to build from source, does it give you the output from stack? How much time did you give it before giving up? (There are quite a few dependencies to install so it might just be that it’s slow)

[gakada]

Both yarn and npm installs worked for me after installing ncurses5-compat-libs from AUR (it was complaining about missing libtinfo.so.5 before that). Though that is still inconvenient:

• There is no officially supported way to install AUR packages AFAIK
• ncurses5-compat-libs also requires to add a GPG key manually (as mentioned here)
• It also downloads from ftp.gnu.org which is known to be down frequently (had to manually download the files).