[GHC DevOps Group] FreeBSD in Tier 1

[Manuel M T Chakravarty]

[RESENT MESSAGE — see https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devops-group/2017-October/000004.html]


Hi Gábor, thanks a lot for clarifying the situation and also for continuing to provide advise about FreeBSD where your time allows. That is much appreciated.

Simon, Ben, this sounds to me very much like a Tier 2 commitment. May I suggest that we classify FreeBSD as Tier 2 until somebody else comes along who can commit to actively maintaining the platform and provide timely fixes (starting with fixing the current problems)?

Manuel

PS: I know, it would be perfect to provide great support for many platforms, but as it stands, we are having trouble with even the core ones.

> Páli Gábor János <pali.gabor at gmail.com>:
> 
> Hello there,
> 
> 2017-10-09 17:03 GMT+02:00 Ben Gamari <ben at well-typed.com>:
>> While Páli does not contribute many patches, I can confirm that he is
>> indeed active.
> 
> Thanks Ben for vouching me :-)  Though I do not know what the original
> question was, let me just give you a brief "status report" perhaps
> that could help with the answer.
> 
> TL;DR: Yes, I am still here, and available for questions and support,
> but I do not track the status of GHC-head/FreeBSD so closely and not
> do changes to it myself these days.
> 
> I did most of my work in the FreeBSD Project where I maintained the
> GHC port and ports for certain Cabal packages.  I also run a GHC build
> bot to monitor the health of FreeBSD builds for GHC-head, and I
> requested for a GHC repository commit access to submit occasional
> fixes or port-specific changes to the upstream directly.  I use
> FreeBSD daily as a primary system, where I usually have some version
> of GHC (8.0.2 as of yet) installed as well.
> 
> My priorities have changed a while ago, I gave up my Haskell-related
> position at the university by September, and I am about to start a new
> non-Haskell job in the industry soon.  As a result, the machine that
> served the daily FreeBSD snapshots is currently offline, I do not
> either do Haskell commits to the FreeBSD ports repository directly,
> and I silently acknowledged that GHC HQ now does the FreeBSD/amd64
> builds for the GHC releases.
> 
> But I am still helping the interested FreeBSD Project committers or
> contributors with reviewing patches, and I am still watching the
> FreeBSD-specific GHC Trac tickets and comment on them as my time
> permits.  I may be back on the ride once for more but I cannot tell
> that for now.
> 
>> In my experience GHC builds without any trouble on FreeBSD 11, which has a
>> new, less broken toolchain.
> 
> We have been using the latest version of GCC and binutils from the
> FreeBSD Ports Collection as binutils in the FreeBSD base system is
> stuck in 2007 and the now-default LLVM-based alternative (Clang, LLDB,
> LLD etc.) is not yet there on every supported release as you could
> have also experienced that.
> 
> There is a patch floating around somewhere in the FreeBSD Phabricator
> to make the official FreeBSD GHC port to use base Clang by default, so
> it could get a wider testing, but apparently it is only a viable
> option on FreeBSD 11 and later.
> 
> Cheers,
> Gábor