[ANNOUNCE] Shaking up GHC

[Andrey Mokhov]

Dear GHC developers,

I am happy to announce that the Shaking up GHC project has finally reached the first milestone. The goal of the project is to design a new GHC build system based on Shake that will eventually replace the current make-based one. See the project page for more details: https://github.com/snowleopard/shaking-up-ghc. 

There is still a long way until we can match the capabilities of the current build system. At the moment we only build vanilla way. Validation, documentation, build flavours and cross-compilation are not yet implemented. Known limitations are listed here: https://github.com/snowleopard/shaking-up-ghc#current-limitations. 

The purpose of this announcement is to attract alpha testers and collect early feedback across multiple platforms and build configurations. We already have several success reports on Linux, OS X, Solaris and Windows. However, things will inevitably break and we hope to catch and fix as many of these cases as possible with your help. The instructions on how to try the new build system can be found here: https://github.com/snowleopard/shaking-up-ghc#your-first-build.

We plan to be ready to become a part of the GHC tree around 1 March 2016, and catch up with the make build system around 1 June 2016. The dates are tentative and depend on how much time it takes us to resolve the remaining issues: https://github.com/snowleopard/shaking-up-ghc/milestones. 

I would like thank everyone who contributed to this project so far: Simon Peyton Jones, Neil Mitchell and Simon Marlow came up with the idea and guided me throughout the project; Moritz Angermann, Ben Gamari, Karel Gardas, David Luposchainsky, and Neil Mitchell contributed to the codebase. Thank you all!

Kind regards,
Andrey