[GHC DevOps Group] FreeBSD in Tier 1

[Boespflug, Mathieu]

Hi Ben,

#14300 contains useful info. But I did have a general question. That
ticket mentions specific instructions for FreeBSD in some README. But
the README in GHC HEAD does not mention any BSD in any way. Is there
some other platform specific README I should be aware of? If so, this
should be included in the GHC repo proper.

As it is, I did have gcc6 from ports installed before building GHC,
but clearly the standard `./boot && ./configure && gmake` instructions
were insufficient to make use of that. I later found out through
browsing GHC Trac tickets that there are these instructions:

https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Building/Preparation/FreeBSD

But they are marked in bold for "developers and early adopters", not
any user that checks out the GHC source code.

> In my experience GHC builds without any trouble on FreeBSD 11, which has a new, less broken toolchain.

Not any recent checkout of GHC HEAD, surely? The commit that
introduced the first bug in Manuel's list is timestamped August 1st.
Here's the output of compiling FreeBSD currently on CircleCI:

https://circleci.com/gh/tweag/ghc/41

Which I guess should be no surprise, since Gábor points out
down-thread that the old FreeBSD build bot is no longer in service. So
just like the unreliable presence of the OS X build bots, let's do
away with them! (by using hosted infrastructure instead)

As soon as this is fixed in HEAD, ./validate for FreeBSD will be able
to make progress. Meanwhile, it sounds reasonable to me to call this
"Tier 2".


On 9 October 2017 at 17:03, Ben Gamari <ben at well-typed.com> wrote:
> Manuel M T Chakravarty <manuel.chakravarty at tweag.io> writes:
>
>> According to
>>
>>   https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/TeamGHC
>>   <https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/TeamGHC>
>>
>> it is Páli Gábor János aka pgj whose last commit was 20 Jul 2016:
>>
>>   https://github.com/ghc/ghc/commit/0df3f4cdd1dfff42461e3f5c3962f1ecd7c90652
>>   <https://github.com/ghc/ghc/commit/0df3f4cdd1dfff42461e3f5c3962f1ecd7c90652>
>>
> While Páli does not contribute many patches, I can confirm that he is
> indeed active. In fact, he recently provided an explanation of the
> failure that Mathieu observed in #14300. In short, the issue is that the
> platform toolchain is buggy due to tiresome licensing issue. In my
> experience GHC builds without any trouble on FreeBSD 11, which has a
> new, less broken toolchain.
>
> Cheers,
>
> - Ben
>
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