Installing Pandoc on Ubuntu Gutsy

I am a very big fan of Pandoc - a tool for converting from one markup format to another. It's most useful for me in converting Markdown-formatted text into S5 or "regular" HTML.

Unfortunately (for me at least) Pandoc isn't yet a standard package in Ubuntu Gutsy (it will apparently be in Hardy) and as far as I know, it hasn't been officially backported.

So, I had to install it myself, package by package, finally compiling from source:

First, version 0.46 (and 0.45) had an error that prevented me compiling it:

jkemp@deepsea:~/pandoc-0.46$ make
./setup configure --prefix=/usr/local --with-compiler=ghc --with-hc-pkg=ghc-pkg
setup: pandoc.cabal:39: 'Executable' stanza starting with field 'library
if flag(splitbase)
build-depends'
make: *** [dist/setup-config] Error 1

I was able to successfully make version 0.44 by first installing the following packages from the usual (Gutsy) places:

jkemp@deepsea:~/$ sudo apt-get install ghc6 libghc6-xhtml-dev libghc6-mtl-dev libghc6-network-dev

Note: I determined the necessary libraries by checking the pandoc.cabal file included in the source tarball, and adding 'libghc6--dev' to the install line above. I verified this by then removing the libraries, and running make, replacing each library one by one.

After doing that, and unpacking the source tarball, I just ran 'make' and 'sudo make install' in the source directory, and voila, I was able to run Pandoc!