Release building for Windows

[Mark Lentczner]

Randy Polen, undertook porting the new build of Haskell Platform to
Windows. He did a great job... but as this is first time stepping up to
such a big release, he has some questions about GHC and Windows, and the
choices he had to make. He asked me to forward these to this list, as he's
not a member. He's cc'd so you can reply to all and include him... or I can
forward as needed.

>From Randy:
------------------
I am building the Haskell Platform 2014.2.0.0 on the Windows side. Your
advice
would be very helpful to make sure the HP 2014 for Windows is as good as
possible.

There were some issues I worked-around, plus some features that seem to not
be
available in this particular GHC (7.8.3) on the 32-bit and 64-bit Windows
platforms, and I would like to confirm that HP 2014.2.0.0 will be shipping
something sensible and as expected for the Windows environment, noting
things
which are supported on other environments but not on Windows.

* GHC 7.8.3 on Windows does not support building Haskell into shared
libraries,
(GHC ticket #8228) so all packages in HP 2014.2.0.0 for Windows have been
built
without --enable-shared

* GHC 7.8.3 on Windows does not currently support LLVM (GHC ticket #7143)

* All Windows HP 2014.2.0.0 packages have been built without
--enabled-split-objs, in deference to the GHC 7.8 FAQ

* Extra python, etc. bits included in the GHC 7.8.3 bindist for 64-bit
Windows
(GHC issue #9014) are not installed with Windows HP 2014.2.0.0.  Is eliding
them from the HP 2014.2.0.0 64-bit Windows installation safe and correct
(i.e., are they truely not required)?

* Missing src/html in GHC packages were worked around by replacing the
entire
GHC package doc tree of html files with the contents of the "Standard
Libraries" tarball (but not for the two packages which are not built for
Windows, terminfo and unix).  Is this valid to do?  Any issues might arise?
   * ref: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/libraries.html.tar.bz2

Thanks for any advice on these. I do want to make the Windows HP
2014.2.0.0 be as good as it can be.

Randy
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