The reason for non-GHC boot dependencies

[Hécate]

Thanks a lot for the clarification Andreas.

So, the present situation is that we seem to have an implicit set of 
packages that are readily available to users of ghc and ghci, but which 
serve no direct goal for the end-user, and whose presence is fairly 
arbitrary.

In light of the recent discussions about the mental model of 
dependencies, cabal and GHC, I was wondering if anything was keeping us 
expose these packages the user does not explicitly download.

I will take some time to see how to switch to (haskell-)static linking 
for distribution releases.

Have a nice day,

Hécate

Le 10/07/2024 à 18:10, Andreas Klebinger via ghc-devs a écrit :
> I think they could be statically linked. But those boot libraries don't
> change much and generally
> don't really cause us nor users pain so it seems like there is little
> reason to do so to me.
>
> > Surely the size of binaries can't be the only concern, otherwise we'd
> use upx¹ on them when distributing them.
>
> I believe Ben experimented with executable compression tools in the past
> with little success.
> But there were segfaults, executables being flagged by antivirus and
> perhaps more issues I forgot
> which just made using it unrealistic at the time.
>
> But perhaps the tooling has matured in the meantime.
>
> Since our distributions are already compressed purely for *distribution*
> purposes I would expect the gains there to be rather slim anyway.
>
> So it's not really that we don't care about size, just that these tools
> seemed not reliable enough for the benefits they offer in the past.
>
> Am 10/07/2024 um 11:01 schrieb Hécate via ghc-devs:
>> Hi devs,
>>
>> I had a chat earlier today with someone and found myself unable to
>> explain the reason why GHC came with boot dependencies like xhtml,
>> that are dependencies of Haddock and HPC.
>>
>> Obviously, the binaries are (haskell-)dynamically linked when
>> distributed, but what is the reason why haddock, hpc, etc can't be
>> (haskell-)statically linked when distributed?
>>
>> Surely the size of binaries can't be the only concern, otherwise we'd
>> use upx¹ on them when distributing them.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Hécate
>>
>>
>> 1: https://upx.github.io
>>
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