[GHC DevOps Group] FreeBSD in Tier 1

[Páli Gábor János]

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