GHC 6.4 release candidates available (breakage on suse 9.2 x86 or x86-64)

[Wolfgang Thaller]

> Thanks, good to know; I'll read through 10.2 more carefully.  I didn't 
> think I'd need to cross-compile x86-linux to x86-linux.

You don't need to - the recommended way is to download a binary 
version. If you don't like using binary distributions, then use it for 
bootstrapping only, i.e. use it to build a ghc of your choice and then 
delete it again. This is just like what you usually do when you install 
gcc on your box for the first time.

>  Would it be unreasonable to include the unregisterised .hc files with 
> a source distribution (or .hc files for "popular" platforms), so that 
> a Haskell novice such as myself could do a "./configure && make && 
> make install"?  If configure detected no ghc, perhaps it could do the 
> bootstrap automagically.

Well, the contents of the .hc files heavily depend on the results of 
./configure - so unregistered .hc files still have to be tailor-made 
for the target platform.
As far as registerised .hc files for popular platforms go, I fail to 
see the point. In what way is bootstrapping from platform-specific .hc 
files superior to installing a binary (apart from the fact that it 
takes longer and looks cooler)? It would be like shipping GCC as a 
bunch of x86 .s files.

Cheers,

Wolfgang