help migrating a tool that uses the ghc api

[Tom Ellis]

On Thu, May 18, 2023 at 10:05:34PM +0100, Sam Halliday wrote:
> 1. some programming language communities have a "community build" that
>    is periodically built by snapshots of the compiler. This allows
>    unexpected regressions to be caught early in the dev cycle and would
>    allow the author of refactor changes to send a courtesy patch to keep
>    the broken code running if the change is intended to be kept in the
>    compiler. I'd like to propose hsinspect for such a community build.

Hi Sam, there are a couple of ways something like this could work:

1. Team GHC tracks a set of packages and can send fixes ahead of time.

2. Packages track GHC and can fix themselves ahead of time.


I believe you're proposing 1, and I think it already exists:

    http://ghc.gitlab.haskell.org/head.hackage/

I understood that head.hackage ran on the entirety of Hackage so
hsinspect[1] should have been picked up by it.  I lack a lot of
knowledge about head.hackage though, so perhaps someone with more
knowledge can chime in.


If you're interested in 2 then the Haskell Foundation is working on
making nightly builds of GHC accessible.  The latest I've heard is
from David Christiansen (HF Executive Director) on Discourse:

    https://discourse.haskell.org/t/haskell-foundation-february-2023-update/5896#requirements-gathering-for-nightly-releases-6

If you're interested I suggest you get in touch with David (perhaps on
that thread).

Tom


[1] https://hackage.haskell.org/package/hsinspect-0.0.18