I've updated the configure script to download the mingw distribution on the fly (D339, #9218). I could use some help with a few things:

1. Validating the update to gcc 4.8.3. I tried to run the tests and got some failures, but I am not sure if they indicate problems with gcc or it's just noise.

2. Some general testing of the updated configure script.

3. Testing the build process on a 32-bit platform.

4. Setup of a local mirror of the distribution files on haskell.org.

On Mon, Oct 13, 2014 at 11:34 AM, Herbert Valerio Riedel <hvriedel@gmail.com> wrote:
On 2014-10-13 at 10:57:10 +0200, Simon Peyton Jones wrote:
> I think the potential difficulty is (1).  Maybe they take it down (e.g. they move on to version X so they take down old version Y).
>
> An alternative would be to stash a copy somewhere on GHC’s main web
> server, and wget that.  I’d be more comfortable doing that; less
> dependence on others.

I guess storing a copy somewhere on https://ghc.haskell.org/ should be
ok (I'm hoping Austin may weigh in wrt CDN-related considerations). I'd
suggest using it as a fallback location though. I.e. try downloading
from the official upstream location, and if that fails (either due to
I/O errors and/or unexpected checksum), fallback to using our locally
mirrored copy. However, we may need to take into account license issues,
such as hosting the source-code as well, if we host binary distributions
depending on the licenses involved (I'm not sure if this was ever
considered for ghc-tarballs.git to begin with)

Cheers,
  hvr



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