Building ghc on Windows with msys2

[Gintautas Miliauskas]

> However, overall (not GHC use cases) gcc 4.9.1 still looks more buggy on
> Windows than 4.8.3. 'Mingw-builds' project (which is now a part of
> mingw-w64 project and is considered to be an "official" mingw-w64 gcc
> distribution and is maintained by a man close to Msys2 project) has very
> nice and complete build of 4.8.3 (64-bit build, for example, is here:
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw-w64/files/Toolchains%20targetting%
> 20Win64/Personal%20Builds/mingw-builds/4.8.3/threads-posix/seh/).
>

I am looking into migrating ghc to the newer gcc package linked above.
There is also the associated question of what to do with ghc-tarballs.

Here's an idea: how about downloading the mingw package directly from
sourceforge at configure time with curl/wget? That should work pretty well.
I see two potential issues:

1. URL stability. The sourceforge repo is not in our control and files in
it could go away any time. The repo seems stable though, with some files
from 2011. If we're concerned about this, copying the file to a domain
under our control should not be a problem. I did not get any responses
about who to contact about that though...

2. Download failing due to internet connectivity issues or missing proxy
configuration. This could easily be addressed by printing a message with a
URL and a filesystem location to put the file in the case that the download
fails.

If there are no objections, I'll proceed with whipping up a patch.

-- 
Gintautas Miliauskas
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/attachments/20141013/35b08145/attachment.html>