Hi Ben,

Updating the new build tool is e right thing to do, long term, but it unfortunate doesn't help with my objective of compiling old versions of ghc ... but there is a quick here that I could exploit. Since I'm building for the same platform, bug just using different versions of the operating system, I think I can create the C files in an old Debian inside docker and use them in the more modern host machine to build the old ghc.

On Fri, 31 Aug 2018, 15:36 Ben Gamari, <ben@smart-cactus.org> wrote:

Sam Halliday <sam.halliday@gmail.com> writes:

> Hi Ben,
>
> This would definitely help. I could use a docker image of a really old
> OS that has old ghc binaries available, to generate the .c for that
> old version of GHC (e.g. v 7.0 or something). Then I could use those
> files to bootstrap a ghc 7.0 on my machine, and from there every
> version of ghc since. It would make a lot of sense for the
> "unregistered" sources to be made available as an optional download
> alongside the source code, if haskell.org were open to that
> possibility.
>
This is a very interesting idea. The build system currently isn't
really setup in a way to make this possible, but this could likely be
changed in our new build system, Hadrian. Also, I suspect this would
require some adjustments to the C code generator, which very likely has
some platform dependence in its output.

Perhaps you'd like to try picking up this task?

Cheers,

- Ben