On Mon, Sep 08, 2008 at 01:22:15PM +0100, Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:
We'd like GHC to be buildable on BSD, but at the moment it isn't. We support GHC on Linux, Windows, Mac, but we really need help with BSD.
The current plans for OpenBSD (and I can only speak for OpenBSD here) are to provide a separate port/package with a trimmed down GHC 6.6.1 and use this to bootstrap GHC 6.10. This allows us to get a clean build without HC bootstrapping (and without ugly hacks like having to download a precompiled binary for bootstrapping). And we'll recycle the the 6.6.1 port once HC bootstrapping works again.
Alas, we didn't get much response to Simon's message below. (One, I think -- thank you to that person! I think it was Kili, but I'm not sure.)
I'm not sure, either. For the GHCi problem with mremap: well, it wouldn't be a catastrophic failure if it can't be fixed for the GHC 6.10 release, IMHO. We already had a broken GHCi on amd64 in the past (due to some real stupidity on my side, for which Don helped out), and the number of complaints I got was rather small ;-) BTW: I've only an i386 here, so fixing bugs happening on amd64 is difficult.
So this message is to say: if you'd like GHC on BSD, please help! No help probably means no GHC. Time is short before GHC 6.10.
If it isn't completely broken and just has some annoyances and bugs, you don't have to despair if bug fixes don't happen before the release. And at least on i386, the current GHC (6.9.20080908) can be built from GHC 6.6.1 up to stage2, and a second GHC can be built with this first build (I've still some problem with the make logic when trying to install this second build, but that's probably a PEBCAK). GHCi seems work fine, too. Any bugs hitting the release can be fixed for us (OpenBSD) after the release. Either upstream, in your repository, or, should any necessary fixes be too intrusive for other platforms, as simple patches in our ports tree. I may sound like a lazy slacker, but unfortunately I've just not enough spare time to work on GHC. And given the frustration I had during the last months, I'll also pass maintainership of our official GHC related ports to someone else, but I'll work on GHC head instead; doing both at the same time just isn't possible for now. Ciao, Kili ps: OpenBSD-4.4 will ship in october, with still GHC 6.6.1; we've time until feburary 2008 to get GHC 6.10 ready to with OpenBSD-4.5.