In spite of all the warnings, I tried to build ghc 5.02.3 from scratch. The first step,

...

./distrib/hc-build returned the error make[1]: *** No rule to make target `Addr.o', needed by `libHSlang.a'. Stop. make: *** [all] Error 1

hmm, do you have Addr.hc in hslibs/lang?

I'm actually building on a standard Linux x86 platform. The resaon I want to build from scratch is to incorporate GHC into the portage source tree for the Gentoo distribution, http://www.gentoo.org

The way I'm doing this for the FreeBSD port now is to have the build process download a pre-built cut-down binary distribution of GHC purely for bootstrapping. We used to bootstrap from .hc files in the ports tree but after a while it was just too fragile and hard to get right. Cheers, Simon