Re: Removing packages without DESTDIR support

[David Holland <dholland-pkgtech%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 08:47:29AM +0200, Thomas Klausner wrote:
 > > We need to Do Something(TM) about ghc -- I'm still not sure what but
 > > I guess I'd better see to it, as I'm using it right now. With any luck
 > > that will allow fixing the other Haskell packages (darcs, wxhaskell).
 > > I'm adding kristerw explicitly in the hopes that he has something to
 > > say.
 > 
 > There's a wip package for ghc which doesn't set rpaths correctly and
 > creates the PLIST dynamically (don't do that), but is perhaps a better
 > base than starting from scratch.

I'm aware of that... doesn't really help much. The issue is that ghc
is self-hosting, and furthermore, each release can only be built using
the next-oldest one and no older. So it needs a binary bootstrap kit,
and at the moment the chief problem is that nobody has an automated
scheme for producing one. (It used to be possible to bootstrap from
included C sources, but that method is now deprecated.)

I think what needs to be done is to create a bootstrap-ghc package
that builds bootstrap kits using the installed ghc, and modify the ghc
package to use that bootstrap kit. Then the package can be updated to
a reasonably recent version one step at a time. Then we can try to
figure out how to produce and maintain bootstrap kits for more than
just i386, probably by generating a different cross-compiling
bootstrap kit that can be used to produce bootstrap kits for other
platforms. Or something like that.

After this stuff gets taken care of we can worry about things like
plists and destdir support. Although I suspect updating will probably
get us free destdir support, like with nhc98.

-- 
David A. Holland
dholland%netbsd.org@localhost