Building ghc on Windows with msys2

[Gintautas Miliauskas]

Hey,

I can only address a small subset of your comments as I don't usually
> develop on Windows and hence lack any significant Windows experience...
>

Thanks. Honestly, I'm no fan of Windows either. Not sure how I got into
this mess :)

> 2. Since the msys2 setup instructions are so simple and linear, perhaps it
> > would be even better to put them in a shellscript and check that in? Then
> > the wikipage would turn into a one-liner.
>
> Fwiw, I recently tried msys2, but after wasting several hours I simply
> couldn't get it to work in a way where I could ssh (tried Freesshd and
> Winsshd) into an MSYS2 environemnt.
>

Actually, that seems to work fine over here. I just needed to install the
'openssh' package using pacman (I think it may have been installed by
default), then create a user 'sshd' in /etc/passwd (for privilege
separation) and create ssh host keys (ssh-keygen -A). Then "sshd" started a
server that I was able to connect to successfully.

Anyway, this does not seem to be relevant to the build environment
discussion...


> from now on the graphical Windows console/deskopt isn't required anymore
> (which was my primary goal). Everything else can be done headless/remote
> via ssh:
>
>  - `wget` ghc-7.6.3 windows bindist and unpack to /opt/ghc-7.6.3
>  - prepend /opt/ghc-7.6.3/bin/ and /opt/ghc-7.6.3/mingw/bin/ to user's
>    PATH via ~/.bash_profile or similiar
>  - follow similiar steps to grab cabal and install alex/happy like for
>    MSYS2; you need to pass `--configure-option=--build=x86_64-w64-mingw32`
>    to cabal, though.
>  - apt-cyg install automake git
>  - clone and build ghc as if it was MSYS2
>

Fair enough.

I prefer msys2 as it seems to be a more minimalistic and simpler
environment that Cygwin (and installation seems easier too). Are there
other advantages to cygwin?


> > 3. Why is ghc-tarballs a git repository? That does not seem very wise.
> [...]
> > Could we have a stable folder under haskell.org/ to put the files in, to
> > make sure that they never go away, and just wget/curl them from there?
>
> http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.ghc.devel/4883/focus=4887
>

Hmm, that was a while ago. Whom should I contact to get the files deployed
under haskell.org?

> 11. A build with the host gcc failed. I think the cause is that it is too
> > new (4.9.1, significantly newer than 4.6.3 in ghc-tarballs). The build of
> > the currently checked in GMP (libraries/integer-gmp) fails because a
> > utility used in the build process segfaults. I tried upgrading gmp from
> > 5.0.3 to 6.0.0, and 6.0.0 builds fine by itself but the ghc-specific
> patch
> > used for 5.0.3 no longer applies (is it still necessary?). Oh brother.
> One
> > of the advantages of tracking msys2's gcc would be that we would notice
> > such breakage earlier. Shall I open an issue?
>
> The patched in-tree GMP lib isn't necessary anymore with the rewritten
> integer-gmp2 package (which was one of the motivations to do the rewrite
> in the first place).
>

Cool! Why is the old library still in the tree then? Can it be deleted?


> > Might be a good idea to put in a guard in the configure script to warn
> > if a cygwin gcc is detected (or add explicit support for
> > it). Actually, looks like there's already a related issue open,
> > although I'm not quite sure what the scope is there (#8842
> > <https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/8842>, thanks Thomas).
>
> It'd be great if one couldn't only use Cygwin as a `build`-environment,
> but also as the `host`-environment you compile for.
>

You mean, being able to build binaries which use cygwin1.dll /
msys-2.0.dll? Not sure there's much benefit to that...


> > 14. The test runner assumes native Windows Python, but it's only a few
> > small changes away from working fine on the python2 provided by msys2,
> > which would cut another external build dependency. Could someone review
> and
> > merge my patches (#9604 <https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/9604>,
> > #9626 <https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/9626>)? Thanks.
>
> Fwiw, the test-runner seems to work fine with the Cygwin-provided Python
> interpreter.
>

Hmm, interesting...

-- 
Gintautas Miliauskas
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