Sam Halliday
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