Dear Xiao-Yong, thank you very much for your willingness to help. I would suggest you look into some of the builds for various platforms as you mentioned. One infrastructure I find particularly interesting is pkgsrc (www.pkgsrc.org) which can be used to effortlessly build numerous packages from source on various OSs and platforms. The approach taken there for building GHC is to provide pre-compiled C sources of an early GHC version, that is then used to bootstrap a more recent version. Unfortunately, the GHC package in pkgsrc is currently limited to i386 only. As far as I understand this limitation is only due to the fact that the maintainer only generated the intermediate C sources for i386 and I would think a similar approach should work with other platforms. Take all this with a lot of salt: I have only looked into these matters cursorily, but it's where I would start looking deeper... Good luck and best regards, Marko At Mon, 06 Apr 2009 17:43:09 -0400, Xiao-Yong Jin wrote:

Hi,

I learned that no one is doing generic unix source tarball, right now, and thought I might help to get it start. I have decent skills on Makefile, but knows very little about auto-tools. I can only spent a few hours every week on it, because I don't have too much spare time as a PhD student. But I still want to help, since it is quite important for Haskell to distribute as widely as possible.

So, how should I start? I learned that ghc supports quite a lot of platforms in its tier2 support list through community supporters. I'm not sure what is the most convenient way to combine these into a generic source tarball. And what do we use to bootstrap ghc? Some pre-compiled binary?

I'm not sure how I should start. Any insight?

Best, Xiao-Yong

P.S. I tried to send to haskell-platform, but got rejected. What's going on?

---------- begin error message ---------- ... while talking to community.haskell.org.:

...

...

...

DATA <<< 550 Unrouteable address 550 5.1.1 ... User unknown <<< 503 valid RCPT command must precede DATA ---------- end error message ---------- -- c/* __o/* <\ * (__ */\ <

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