moving from ghc-6.2 to 6.4

[Johannes Waldmann]

I am trying to bring a larger heap of code (http://141.57.11.163/auto/ )
into 6.4 land (because of wonder stories about faster compilation,
faster execution, Data.Map, and so on ...)
Here are a few observations and questions
that may be useful to others as well.

* what is the situation with ghc-6.4 for sparc/solaris?
   I don't see a binary package in the download area.
   I started to build from source - can this be successful?

   (The rest of this report refers to i386/linux)

* Cabal is very nice! - The only thing that was confusing me
   is that I have to list all modules in the *.cabal file:
   if I don't, it still happily builds and installs the package
   but it cannot be used, giving linker errors. Couldn't this be
   checked earlier? Or better, couldn't it infer the needed
   hidden modules? Anyway I can generate the module list by a shell
   script but that does not feel right. - How do I build and install
   a profiling version of a package, how does Cabal support this?

* (when building HSQL-1.4) CTime is no longer an instance of Integral,
   so I replaced  fromIntegral  by  fromIntegral . fromEnum,  is this OK?

* the name of  mkAppTy  changed to  mkTyConApp
   (I hope it's only the name that changed)

* I don't see "dramatic" improvements in execution times -
   are there some magic ghc options I missed? I used -O -fvia-C.
   Still, executables are maybe 2 .. 5 % smaller and faster than they
   were with 6.2 - and compilation without -O is really fast.

Best regards, and thanks to the GHC team.
-- 
-- Johannes Waldmann -- Tel/Fax (0341) 3076 6479/80 --
---- http://www.imn.htwk-leipzig.de/~waldmann/ -------