On Wednesday 30 January 2008 10:13:01 Manuel M T Chakravarty wrote:
Upon inspection of the configure script, I found out that line 2651 uses the variable designating the ghc compiler.
This is due to a change of the configure stage that AFAIK was made to easy building on windows. Instead, of using shell commands/scripts (as GHC did previously) to obtain some configuration information (here the file path at which the top of the GHC build tree is located), the build system now uses small Haskell programs/scripts. This makes the build more portable ** if there is already a Haskell compiler on the system **. It however messes everything up if you want to build from HC files (and so don't have a Haskell compiler). I am not sure whether anybody thought about this problem when the change to using Haskell scripts instead of shell scripts was made. Ian? Simon?
The only solution that I see is to replace the Haskell scripts by vanilla shell scripts in HC bundles. Even if that causes problems on windows (without cygwin), it would make HC bundles viable on Unix systems again.
Dear Manuel, Your explanation makes perfect sense. For those more involved in the build process of GHC: How hard is it to roll back the vanilla shell scripts that once upon a time were used and to have 'configure' default to them when the --enable-hc-boot switch is used? Wrt. to the missing .hc files from rts/*.cmm: Since these weren't built in the make process, are they actually required? If not, it should simply be an extra test in the Makefile for the hc-file-bundle. Regards, Philip