Building ghc on Windows with msys2

[Simon Peyton Jones]

I think the potential difficulty is (1).  Maybe they take it down (e.g. they move on to version X so they take down old version Y).

An alternative would be to stash a copy somewhere on GHC’s main web server, and wget that.  I’d be more comfortable doing that; less dependence on others.

but I am a babe in these particular woods, and defer to others wisdom.

Simon

From: ghc-devs [mailto:ghc-devs-bounces at haskell.org] On Behalf Of Gintautas Miliauskas
Sent: 12 October 2014 23:06
To: kyra
Cc: ghc-devs at haskell.org
Subject: Re: Building ghc on Windows with msys2


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
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