On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 5:35 PM, Claus Reinke
Getting the source that actually matches the installed binaries is not straightforward (unrecorded compilation options). Sometimes, one "accurate in spirit" version of the source might be sufficient independent of the details of the installed binary packages. There are tickets pending, with discussion of the issues:
http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/2630 http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ticket/364
Also, Cabal has recently acquired an 'unpack' command, which allows to unpack the source for a package into a local directory.
But someone still needs to connect the pieces, either for each tool, or for a common framework that all source-dependent tools could use.
I see, so I guess the short answer is "there's just no easy way to do it for now". Perhaps I'll write a Perl script that will do it for me while waiting for a standardized solution. The issue of source/binary version mismatches shouldn't be a problem as long as the source I copy over is the same source I built from right? Or are you suggesting that sometimes the source is transformed during the build process before being compiled?
Second, I cannot create a windows build of GHC under cygwin. Looking at
the Building Guide on the wiki suggests that this is indeed supported.
Personally, I last built the head version
$ ghc --version The Glorious Glasgow Haskell Compilation System, version 6.11.20090320
that way. The buildbots seem to succeed most of the time recently, with some recent issues in stable:
http://darcs.haskell.org/buildbot/
(whenever windows head/stable builds there, it is a good time to pull patches;-)
However, when I try to build it I get
cabal-bin.exe: Cannot find the program 'ghc' at '/cygdrive/c/dev/haskell/ghc/ghc-6.10.1/bin/ghc' or on the path make[1]: *** [bootstrapping.conf] Error 1 make[1]: Leaving directory `/cygdrive/c/dev/haskell/ghc/ghc-6.10.1-src/libraries' make: *** [stage1] Error 2
There seems to be some unix/windows confusion here, because it's looking for an executable file named "ghc", when the actual executable name is "ghc.exe".
Not just that. Cabal is also trying to find ghc via a cygwin path (about which ghc-compiled binaries like Cabal don't know a thing).
Are you sure you've configured for mingw? Otherwise the build system will try to proceed in cygwin, as if for a unix platform.
I'm pretty sure I'm NOT configured for MinGW when I was trying to build under Cygwin. I just assumed that the process would be completely independent of the mingw process. What do I need to do configure the cygwin environment for MinGW?
However, building under MSYS everything works perfectly. Is
Cygwin just not supported, or do I need to change something here? I don't see any point in cluttering up my system with tons of extra software like MinGW, msys, etc if Cygwin works fine.
Mingw provides the C compiler, msys or cygwin the build tools. Even under cygwin, you still need to configure to use the mingw C compiler and linker (not the cygwin versions of these).
Simon Marlow has recently cleaned up the build instructions http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Building
If there's still anything missing or ambiguous in there, please provide details, questions, or improve the wiki pages. We all like those instructions to be accurate, for the next time we start from scratch!-)
Is there a way to download a windows binary distribution of GCC myself and have Cygwin use my version of GCC and Cygwin's version of all tools? It just seems a little superfluous to have two unix environments (Cygwin and mingw) and two separate copies of GCC installed (since I already use windows GCC for other reasons)