"Jesper Louis Andersen"
I assume this is the correct mailing list to send a report of my workings on nhc98 to get an updated NetBSD port.
Yes. Thanks for the report.
The first problem with updating the package is the retrieval phase. This is done by a program, ftp(1), which will try to fetch the file ftp://ftp.cs.york.ac.uk/pub/haskell/nhc98/nhc98src-1.18.tar.gz. Unfortunately, this fails because the york ftp-server and ftp(1) agrees on entering Extended Passive Mode (EPRT and EPSV as per RFC 2428) which I then suspect the york firewall to disallow. Note that programs such as FreeBSDs fetch(1) and wget(1) of GNU chooses not entering EPRT/EPSV mode; thus having no problems fetching the source code.
I have received several reports over the last two or three years, complaining that people have been unable to retrieve packages by FTP. Yet, the logs clearly showed that many other people were successful with FTP, so we have been unable to track down the problem. Your explanation sounds very plausible - I will pass it on our support staff, who will be able to investigate further and hopefully resolve this issue at last.
The obvious way to bootstrap nhc98 would be by gcc. Unfortunately, NetBSDs package tree can select the compiler to be something other than gcc. The reason is the portability of NetBSD. If running on another architecture than, say i386, one could choose a native compiler over gcc for compilation. As a consequence $(CC) is set to be ``cc'' when compiling the nhc98 Makefile; not ``gcc'' as expected. My crude solution were to oversteer $(CC) and substitute it for ${BUILDCOMP}, see patches further down.
If you set the $(CC) variable at configure-time, I think the Makefiles should work OK - if not, then it is a bug. $ CC=cc ./configure --buildwith=$CC $ make basic It is possible that the configure script needs a small patch for this to work in all situations. (attached)
Can nhc98 be compiled by anything else than nhc98? Have you tried? I can alter the package to constrain itself to certain compilers in the case of impossibility.
Yes, nhc98 can be built with ghc, and hbc, in addition to itself. But perhaps you meant to ask whether it can be bootstrapped with a C compiler different from gcc? It certainly did at one time build with Sun's and SGI's proprietary C compilers, but neither of those has been tried for a few years. Regards, Malcolm