Proposal: Improving the LLVM backend by packaging it

[Mateusz Kowalczyk]

On 10/25/2014 12:52 AM, Austin Seipp wrote:
> Hi *,
> 
> A few days ago a discussion on IRC occurred about the LLVM backend,
> its current status, and what we could do to make it a rock solid part
> of GHC for all our users.
> 
> Needless to say, the situation right now isn't so hot: we have no
> commitment to version support, two major versions are busted, others
> are seriously buggy, and yet there are lots of things we could improve
> on.
> 
> So I give you a proposal, from a few of us to you all, about improving it:
> 
> https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/ImprovedLLVMBackend
> 
> I won't repeat what's on the wiki page too much, but the TL;DR version
> is: we should start packaging a version of LLVM, and shipping it with
> e.g. binary distributions of GHC. It's just a lot better for everyone.
> 
> I know we're normally fairly hesitant about things like this (shipping
> external dependencies), but I think it's the only sane thing to do
> here, and the situation is fairly unique in that it's not actually
> very complicated to implement or support, I think.
> 
> We'd like to do this for 7.12. I've also wrangled some people to help.
> Those people know who they are (because they're CC'd), and I will now
> badger them into submission until it is fixed for 7.12.
> 
> Please let me know what you think.
> 
> PS. Joachim, I would be particularly interested in upstream needs for
> Debian, as I know of their standard packaging policy to not duplicate
> things.
> 

I don't think any distro wants to duplicate things. Even if GHC does end
up shipping with LLVM, it should be easy for distro packagers to ignore
that and use their own.

-- 
Mateusz K.