Re: GHC updating

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

On Mon, May 25, 2015 at 10:45:16PM -0400, matthew sporleder wrote:
 > I think the last efforts for getting GHC updated died around late
 > 2013/early 2014.
 > 
 > lang/ghc7 lines up as being the version released in April, 2013.
 > 
 > So here we are two years later needing to get to 7.10.
 > 
 > --
 > 
 > Is the bootstrap politics issue resolved?
 > 
 > Do we need to go ahead and get a TNF machine in order to build some
 > new boostraps?

The problem is not machines, the problem is that replacing the
bootstrap requires hand-building multiple ghc versions, not all of
which will work on netbsd without debugging. 

If you actually want to use ghc and want to help, I would suggest
beginning work on a ghc 6.12 package; use a binary 6.8 package from
the existing lang/ghc as the bootstrap kit. There are TNF-built
packages of that in the package repos.

Eventually we want the 6.12 package to be able to build from a 6.8
binary package, from an already installed 6.8, or from an already
installed 6.12; but that's a fairly straightforward change given the
baseline package.

Once we have a working 6.12 package, then the next step is (I think)
7.4, or maybe 7.2, depending on which is the newest version that still
supports building with 6.12. And so on.

And yes, the only halfway sane way forward is to maintain packages for
all of these.

Then the next step is to set up so that one step builds a
cross-compiler to amd64 so we can have a 64-bit ghc too.

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