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

[Brian Strand]

Wolfgang Thaller wrote:
> Brian Strand wrote:
>> 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?

That seems like a very good idea to me; for bootstrapping, one doesn't need 
ghci, readline, ncurses, etc.  From "ldd ghc-6.4.20050221", it looks like the 
only really essential non-libc library is libgmp (which I'm guessing is used 
for Integer operations at least, and these are hard to do without...).