[IPython-dev] nbconvert on Scientific Linux 5

[Jon Wilson]

Hi,
Because the scientific computing world moves quite slowly, many of the 
systems I use are still running Scientific Linux 5 (based on RHEL 5). 
This presents a problem for nbconvert, with its Haskell dependency.

Most of these systems don't have any Haskell packages installed, and I 
don't have root in order to install them myself.  On one system (not 
SL5), I was able to download the GHC binary and haskell-platform and 
install them in userland.  But SL5 is still using GCC 2.5, so this 
approach fails.

Is there any alternative to pandoc, or has anyone else encountered this 
problem and found a workaround?  I don't think that I have the time to 
set up GHC 6.8 and bootstrap my way up to 7.6.3+ as suggested here:
 
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8426472/compiling-ghc-7-2-on-linux-with-libc-version-2-7

In the meantime, my workaround is to copy notebooks from the SL5 machine 
to the Fedora machine with working pandoc, nbconvert them there, and 
copy them back.  It's quite painful compared to the more usual method.

Suggestions?
Regards,
Jon