[redirecting to ghc-users also] Matthias Kilian wrote:

...

(Which as I understood would make porting a newer ghc to OpenBSD easier).

Yes. The only alternatives would be to provide precompiled binaries (which is ugly, imho) or to maintain several versions of ghc in the ports tree (which is a maintainance nightmare).

.hc files are ugly too; IMO about as ugly as precompiled binaries (.hc are platform specific and practically unreadable, just like binaries). At least the GHC HQ think so: currently bootstrapping-from-HC only works unregisterised (so it will be slow. Also, inherently, won't ever use GHC's NCG :-) (native code generator) ) -Isaac