Bootstrapping for Leopard

[Manuel M T Chakravarty]

Philip K.F. Hölzenspies:
> I'm trying toupdate the Portfile so that ghc-6.8.2 can be built  
> using MacPorts
> (handy for installing other ghc-dependent material from MacPorts like
> gtk2hs). The problem seems to be that the available bootstrap binary
> http://www.haskell.org/ghc/dist/6.6/ghc-6.6-i386-apple-darwin-bootstrap.tar.bz2
> causes a segfault on Leopard (below are the steps I took in my  
> attempt to
> build ghc with this bootstrap binary).
>
> Using Manuel Chakravarty's binary distribution of ghc-6.8.1-i386- 
> apple-darwin
> building ghc-6.8.2 works fine. It seemed to me that the easiest way  
> to fix
> the bootstrap problem is to boot from C as described on the wiki
> (http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Building/Porting). Two  
> things were
> wrong, however.
>
> make hc-file-bundle
>
> Making the hc-file-bundle target failed, because not all rts/*.cmm had
> rts/*.hc counterparts after the build. The make fails because of this
> fragment from the Makefile (part of the hc-file-bundle target,  
> starting from
> line 513):
>
> for f in `$(FIND) ghc-$(ProjectVersion)/compiler
> ghc-$(ProjectVersion)/rts -name "*.cmm" -follow -print` ""; do \
>  if test "x$$f" !=3D "x"; then \
>    echo `echo "$$f" | sed 's/cmm$$/hc/g' ` >> hc-files-to-go ; \
>  fi; \
> done;
>
> This adds some non-existing .hc files to the hc-files-to-go list  
> that tar will
> not find, later on, causing an error. I just added a test to see  
> whether the
> file exists. If it does not, I call make for that .hc file  
> explicitly, which
> solves the problem for most files. The files that don't have a make  
> target, I
> simply omitted from the hc-files-to-go. I haven't been able to test  
> the
> severity of this, because of the second problem.

I am not sure what the problem is here.  Simon?  Ian?

> checking for ld... /usr/bin/ld
> checking for path to top of build tree... ./configure: line 2651: - 
> v0: command
> not found
> ./configure: line 2655: utils/pwd/pwd: No such file or directory
> configure: error: cannot determine current directory
>
> Upon inspection of the configure script, I found out that line 2651  
> uses the
> variable designating the ghc compiler.

This is due to a change of the configure stage that AFAIK was made to  
easy building on windows.  Instead, of using shell commands/scripts  
(as GHC did previously) to obtain some configuration information (here  
the file path at which the top of the GHC build tree is located), the  
build system now uses small Haskell programs/scripts.  This makes the  
build more portable ** if there is already a Haskell compiler on the  
system **.  It however messes everything up if you want to build from  
HC files (and so don't have a Haskell compiler).  I am not sure  
whether anybody thought about this problem when the change to using  
Haskell scripts instead of shell scripts was made.  Ian?  Simon?

The only solution that I see is to replace the Haskell scripts by  
vanilla shell scripts in HC bundles.  Even if that causes problems on  
windows (without cygwin), it would make HC bundles viable on Unix  
systems again.

Manuel