6.4.2 release plans

[Duncan Coutts]

On Wed, 2006-03-15 at 16:24 +0000, Simon Marlow wrote:
> Hi Folks,
> 
> This is a heads up for the forthcoming 6.4.2 release.  Our rough 
> timescale is to go into release candidate testing in about a week, and 
> have two weeks of release candidates before the final release.
> 
> Here are the things we know about and plan to fix before the release:
> 
> http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/query?status=new&status=assigned&status=reopened&milestone=6.4.2&order=priority
> 
> If you have anything else for 6.4.2, please let me know.

Can I suggest taking a look at the some of the settings we use in the
Gentoo ebuild and see if you think any would be more appropriate to do
in the ghc build system.

Our ebuild is here:
http://haskell.org/~gentoo/gentoo-haskell/portage/dev-lang/ghc/ghc-6.4.1-r2.ebuild


We have 2 patches. One to fix compilation of OpenAL:
http://haskell.org/~gentoo/gentoo-haskell/portage/dev-lang/ghc/files/ghc-6.4.1-openal.patch
(I know this is fixed in darcs, I've not checked cvs ghc-6.4-branch)

The other to allow us to enable/disable building the X11, HGL packages:
http://haskell.org/~gentoo/gentoo-haskell/portage/dev-lang/ghc/files/ghc-6.4.1-configure.patch
(this is so we don't get untracked deps on X11, eg when building on one
machine and installing on another)

The next fix is probably not appropriate for everyone. It's to allow ghc
to work with a "hardened" version of gcc, basically by turning off the
hardened features (since they upset the mangler). It's not suitable for
everyone because not all distros use a gcc that has the hardened
features and such gcc's would not recognise the -fno-blah flags.

We have a temporary fix for:
http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/703
which is to use -opta-Wa,--noexecstack in SRC_HC_OPTS, -Wa,--noexecstack
in SRC_CC_OPTS and -opta-Wa,--noexecstack in the ghc wrapper script.

We currently don't support building the pdf docs because there is a bug
in the latest version of libxslt that makes xsltproc segfault when
processing the docbook stuff.
http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=106992
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=316861

We found that using -fno-warn-deprecations in SRC_HC_OPTS fixed the
wierd "tee: write error" issues we had when logging the build process.

There's some wierdness with ArSupportsInput. I'm not sure if that still
applies.

We have some arch-specific defaults for wether to enable certain ghc
features. I think these would be suitable defaults for everyone:

alpha, hppa and ppc64 should use GhcWithInterpreter=NO

alpha, and hppa should use GhcUnregisterised=YES

alpha, hppa, ppc, ppc64 and sparc should use SplitObjs=NO

We also use SplitObjs=NO when building on machines with less than 200Mb
of RAM. This is because with SplitObjs ar takes loads of memory and can
make the build break if there is not enough memory available. Perhaps
this could be fixed better by getting ar to append files to the .a file
in smaller batches rather than all in one go.

I think that's it.

Duncan