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

[Wolfgang Thaller]

Brian Strand wrote:

> I originally tried the binary distribution but ran into library 
> issues.  That is of course the obvious path to try, and try it I did.  
> Rather than going straight to installing deprecated libraries, I tried 
> to provide some feedback on ghc (especially since 6.4 RCs are out).

Well, it seems like I should have read your previous posts more 
attentively before mentioning the recommended way of doing things again 
- sorry.

> Not being intimately familiar with ghc internals, I don't know how 
> much work this is, and whether the implementation cost exceeds the 
> benefit (easier installation for Haskell novices like me).

My guess is that for GHC, it won't work; the .hc files are really too 
low-level. Just about the only thing that's not already decided in the 
.hc files (that I can think of now) is the actual names of the 
libraries that the app links to. We'd need to supply .hc files for 
nearly as many platforms as we need binaries for.
So maybe x86-Linux needs a ghc binary with as few library dependencies 
as possible, to facilitate bootstrapping on different Linux distros?


Cheers,

Wolfgang