I think this is a great idea, I was thinking of creating a ticket for it after 7.8.3 was out of the way. In my case the reason is C++11 support, LLVM has 4.7 as the minimum version now.

Just having a script in git and downloading the tarballs sounds very sensible.

Speaking of LLVM, how about making it (optionally?) download an llvm tarball too?

Niklas

Från: Robin KAY
Skickat: ‎2014-‎06-‎10 01:46
Till: ghc-devs@haskell.org
Ämne: GHC MinGW distribution

Dear All,

I wanted to enquire about the prospects for updating the version of
MinGW which ships with the Windows binary distribution of GHC. The
version included as of 7.8.2 is now several years old and in some cases
I've found that it's incompatible with the libraries produced by newer
versions of MinGW (as to be expected, per my understanding).

Specifically, my HsQML binding for Qt can't be used with the libraries
from the official Windows binary distribution of Qt 5 because the
resulting executables crash on start-up with runtime incompatibilities.
I'm in the process of trying to build out-of-the-box compatible Qt
binaries against GHC's MinGW, but Qt's stated minimum requirements on
the tool-chain version aren't encouraging. The only way I currently have
of making this work is for users to edit their GHC settings file to
point GHC at a version of gcc.exe from a newer MinGW (such as the one
which ships with Qt). The fact that this seems to work is encouraging,
but it's still a bit of a difficult process to put people through.

I know that Windows developers are in short supply, so I would like to
offer what assistance I can in making this happen. There appear to be
copies of MinGW stored in the GHC repository at
http://git.haskell.org/ghc-tarballs.git/tree . Does the build system use
these automatically or are they just there for reference?

Thanks,

--
Robin KAY

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