GHC MinGW distribution

[Herbert Valerio Riedel]

Hello Simon,

On 2014-06-10 at 10:25:46 +0200, Simon Peyton Jones wrote:

[...]

> We physically include very selective chunks of MinGW in a GHC Windows distribution
> - so that users don't need to install MinGW
> - so that GHC doesn't break just because a user has
>   a different version of MinGW than we expected
> We keep these chunks of MinGW in the GHC repo (in ghc-tarballs)
> precisely so that we know exactly which bits to ship.

Btw, there's just one thing I'm worried about with keeping those large
MinGW binary tarballs in a Git repo:

The Git repo will grow monotonically with each new compressed
.tar.{bz2,lzma,gz,...} added, with little opportunity for Git to detect
shared bitstreams. So effectively each MiB of binary-data added will
effectively grow the Git repo everyone will have to clone (even if only
the latest MinGW for a specific 32/64-bit platform is desired) by that
same amount.

Right now, cloning the ghc-tarballs.git repo requires to fetch ~130MiB.

Can't we simply put the tarballs in a plain HTTP folder on
http://ghc.haskell.org, and store a list (or rather a shell script) of
URLs+checksums in ghc.git to retrieve the tarballs if needed on demand?

Cheers,
  hvr