Workflow question (changing codegen)

[Ömer Sinan Ağacan]

Hi all,

I'm currently going through this torturous process and I'm hoping that someone
here will be able to help.

I'm making changes in the codegen. My changes are currently buggy, and I need a
working stage 1 compiler to be able to debug. Basically I need to build
libraries using the branch my changes are based on, then build stage 1 with my
branch, so that I'll be able to build and run programs using stage 1 that uses
my codegen changes. The changes are compatible with the old codegen (i.e. no
changes in calling conventions or anything like that) so this should work.

Normally I do this

    $ git checkout master
    $ git distclean && ./boot && ./configure && make
    $ git checkout my_branch
    $ cd compiler; make 1

This gives me stage 1 compiler that uses my buggy codegen changes, plus
libraries built with the old and correct codegen.

However the problem is I'm also adding a new file in my_branch, and the build
system just doesn't register that fact, even after adding the line I added to
compiler/ghc.cabal.in to compiler/ghc.cabal. So far the only way to fix this
that I could find was to run ./configure again, then run make for a few seconds
at the top level, then do `make 1` in compiler/. Unfortunately even that doesn't
work when the master branch and my_branch have different dates, because `make`
in master branch produces a different version than the `make` in my_branch, so
the interface files become incompatible.

Anyone have any ideas on how to proceed here?

Thanks,

Ömer