[ANNOUNCE] You should try Hadrian

[Phyx]

Hi Andrey

On Sun, Jan 27, 2019 at 10:49 PM Andrey Mokhov <
andrey.mokhov at newcastle.ac.uk> wrote:

> Hi Tamar,
>
>
>
> Here is the relevant bullet point from the README:
>
>
>
> > On Windows, if you do not want to install MSYS, you can
>
> > use the Stack-based build script (Stack provides a managed
>
> > MSYS environment), as described in these instructions.
>
> > If you don't mind installing MSYS yourself or already have it,
>
> > you can use the Cabal-based build script.
>

Yes, I was referring to the "My first build" heading which had a call to
build.bat, but it seems my branch was just old and the file was updated 11
days ago to use cabal instead of stack.
Now the rest of the file also makes sense. Apologies for that, I thought I
had updated


>
> This claim is based on my experience. Installing the MSYS environment has
> never worked out smoothly for me. Doing this via Stack was indeed more
> robust (especially, when struggling with building GHC on Windows CI!). Has
> this been different in your experience?
>
>
>

Yes, stack does nothing special than just un-tar the binary distribution of
msys2. The problem is that this binary distribution is not kept up to date
unless things break. By that point they may have gotten so out of date that
the distribution simply can't even be upgraded. e.g. A while ago they used
a distribution that's so old it couldn't deal with pacman's invalidating
old certificates, which means you couldn't use it to update ca-certificates.

It also can't handle when msys upstream changes core dependencies. One such
update is a change in march that introduced a cyclic dependency between catgets
libcatgets and some packages. Or when they change the package layout as
they did removing the old shell scripts and making Mingw32.exe and
Mingw64.exe. I can name many more. The fact is the msys2 installers are set
up to work around these updates, or you must work around them when
initializing the environment to fix these.

And I see no evidence based on past issues that stack actually keeps their
msys2 installs up to date. So I don't want to go into the business of
managing stack msys2 issues for ghc builds.

> I'm just confused when it was decided to switch the defaults,
>
> > and why, without any consultation.
>
>
>
> I’m not sure what you mean. Could you clarify? The file `doc/windows.md`
> is 3 years old and hasn’t changed much since creation. The default build
> script `build.bat` currently uses Cabal:
>
>
>
> ```
>
> rem By default on Windows we build Hadrian using Cabal
>
> hadrian/build.cabal.bat %*
>
> ```
>

Yes.. I'm pretty sure when I looked at it before today it was pointing to
build.stack.bat, but that seems to be a two week old tree. So my fault
there.

Sorry, should have checked on gitlab!

Regards,
Tamar


>
>
> P.S.: I’ve just noticed that `doc/windows.md` hasn’t been updated when
> moving to GitLab, and created this MR to fix this:
>
>
>
> https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/merge_requests/239
>
>
>
> Please jump into the comments there if you’d like me to fix/clarify
> anything.
>
>
>
> Thanks for reaching out!
>
>
>
> Cheers,
>
> Andrey
>
>
>
> *From:* Phyx [mailto:lonetiger at gmail.com]
> *Sent:* 27 January 2019 21:11
> *To:* Andrey Mokhov <andrey.mokhov at newcastle.ac.uk>; Ben Gamari <
> ben at well-typed.com>
> *Cc:* GHC developers <ghc-devs at haskell.org>
> *Subject:* Re: [ANNOUNCE] You should try Hadrian
>
>
>
> Hi Andrey,
>
>
>
> I'm looking at
> https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/blob/master/hadrian/README.md and
> https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/blob/master/hadrian/doc/windows.md
>
> wondering why the default instructions for Windows are using stack, this
> isn't currently the case.
>
>
>
> In order for ./boot and configure to work already you need to be in an
> msys2 environment. So having stack install its own, un-updated msys2 is not
> a workflow I would recommend.
>
>
>
> There's a dubious claim there that using stack is "more robust", what is
> this claim based on?
>
> I'm just confused when it was decided to switch the defaults, and why,
> without any consultation.
>
>
>
> Regards,
>
> Tamar
>
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