GHC 8.8.2 + cabal-install 3.0.0 finally working on SmartOS x64 20200117 (yet GHC 8.6.5 left less usable)

[Compl Yue]

Folks,

I'm glad to report that I finally get GHC 8.8.2 with cabal-install 
3.0.0.0 working on SmartOS x64, you can checkout detailed steps and all 
the patches applied at https://gitlab.haskell.org/complyue/smart-ghc8

The only pity so far, is that the built GHC 8.6.5 has its `ghci` not 
working with a strange iconv error, and failing building one of my 
Haskell applications. I myself am going to use 8.8.2 where possible  
from now on. But given not all great libs have been updated being 8.8 
compatible, I feel it still worth some further effort to get 8.6.5 working.

And regarding stack, as it's focused on managing binary distributions of 
GHC (build-from-src not working very well per my experience), it'll need 
a trusted binary repository for stack to work with on SmartOS. A private 
http server hosting the bindists should be straight forward, but I'm not 
interested to host a publicly available binary repository with those 
bindist tarballs digitally signed (or there're security concerns). If 
anyone is interested, I'd like to help as far as I can.

I would particular like to see Nix be ported to SmartOS/Illumos/Solaris, 
so I could contribute to nixpkgs instead, which should save more asses 
in tool dependency resolution, but seems that's not an option in near 
future.

I'm thankful to folks at #ghc and #smartos who helped me so much in this 
journey. Especially bgamari, without his hints and bleeding edge patches 
this won't be possible at all. And thanks to geekosaur for his 
professional insights into the linker situation on SmartOS, quick and 
precise identification of the problem from the error messages so 
confusing to me.

https://www.mail-archive.com/smartos-discuss@lists.smartos.org/msg05016.html 
provided the information to get me started at all, and thanks to 
Jonathan Perkin for confirming the bootstrapping path being a viable 
route in the first place.

Cheers,

Compl Yue


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