Need review: ghc

Jens Petersen petersen at redhat.com
Fri May 13 00:44:50 UTC 2005


seth vidal wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-05-12 at 18:43 +0200, Jochen Schmitt wrote:
> 
>>On Thu, 12 May 2005 17:46:26 +0900, you wrote:
>>
>>>ghc[..] requires [itself] to build.
>>>Generating (arch dependent) bootstrap tarballs of C files
>>>with ghc would depend on ghc anyway so the recommended way
>>>to buildstrap ghc in buildroots is using pre-built binary
>>>package: indeed the Debian maintainer tells me this is also
>>>the way new archs are bootstrapped for debian.
>>>
>>>Signed binary packages for Fedora Core i386, ppc and x86_64 are
>>>available from Fedora Haskell <http://haskell.org/fedora/>:

Alternatively rpms generated directly from the official binary
upstream tarballs for generic Linux or the Debian packages
could be used instead if people are uncomfortable with using
the above packages as seeds.

> a package cannot [build]require itself.
> that makes no sense at all.

Erm, well actually it makes perfect sense for a compiler. :)
How do you think gcc builds itself?

As I said above it is possible to bootstrap ghc from C files,
but those C files will be compiler generated by ghc - in a sense
it would be a bit like doing part of the compilation in advance
(think assembler not portable C) and so is really
just pushing the problem over the packager, and it is a *lot*
of work for zero gain.  Once the initial ghc package is in
Extras all subsequent builds of ghc will buildrequire ghc
anyway.

See also: http://haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/building/sec-pre-supposed.html
and http://haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/building/sec-porting-ghc.html .

Cheers, Jens




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