Alexis King
Hi all,
I have a project that I’d like to try to build with GHC HEAD, but it’s a large project with a lot of dependencies, and while there’s a lot of information on building GHC itself, I haven’t been able to find very many resources on what workflow people use to actually build projects in the wild using it. I found this wiki page, “Installing packages in your test compiler,” which has a little guidance, but the details are sparse:
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Apologies if this is really a request for support with cabal-install, and it doesn’t belong on this list, but I figured I’d start here, since I imagine the people on this list are best-equipped to answer questions involving using GHC HEAD. I’d appreciate any pointers or resources anyone has!
Hi Alexis, Your question is a very good one which, until quite recently, there was not a particularly good answer to. However, in the past months we have been working on infrastructure (in the form of head.hackage [0]) to make GHC more testable in pre-release form. I have a draft blog post explaining the currently state-of-play here [1,2]. Unfortunately between ICFP, release things, vacation, and bug fixing I've lacked the time to finish these off (the tutorial in particular). Also, note that this is still just infrastructure. While head.hackage does include a reasonable set of patches, it would be quite surprising if it has everything your project requires. Merge requests contributing new patches are highly encouraged. Cheers, - Ben [0] https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/head.hackage/merge_requests [1] https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/homepage/merge_requests/16 [2] https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/homepage/merge_requests/29