Hi, while trying to make the binary-distribution logic work for cross compilers. I've come wonder, how hard it could be to make GHC relocatable. (e.g. just unpack the distribution, and use the compiler from the `bin` folder within). Right now this does not work due to the need for the path to package.conf, and this is hardcoded in the wrapper script to provide the proper libdir to ghc via -B[1]. Supposedly this is not an issue on Windows, as a relative path is common on windows and finding the location of the executable can be done safely. Or that's at least how I understand[1]. For macOS there is the haskell-platform, and ghc-dot-app[2] From [3], it sounds like automake is a build, and not a packaging system, and the binary dist usecase with configure is not really a standard use case. So why do I bring this up NOW? Apart from me trying to make cross compiler binary distributions working? The reason is that we are also trying to move towards hadrian, and by "starting from scratch", maybe we have a chance to reconsider how we do things? I must admit, I'm quite happy to use packages like llvm, by just downloading a package and adding the `bin` path to my $PATH. There is however one thing that the current configure appraoch does, which I think is quite noteworthy (apart from setting $prefix). That is, it does check for compilers and sets them accordingly, which might be desirable. Cheers, Moritz -- [1]: https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Building/Installing [2]: https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Building/MacOSX/Installer [3]: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/automake/2006-10/msg00005.html