Bootstrapping for Leopard

[Philip K.F. Hölzenspies]

On Wednesday 30 January 2008 10:13:01 Manuel M T Chakravarty wrote:
> > 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.

Dear Manuel,

Your explanation makes perfect sense. For those more involved in the build 
process of GHC: How hard is it to roll back the vanilla shell scripts that 
once upon a time were used and to have 'configure' default to them when 
the --enable-hc-boot switch is used?

Wrt. to the missing .hc files from rts/*.cmm: Since these weren't built in the 
make process, are they actually required? If not, it should simply be an 
extra test in the Makefile for the hc-file-bundle.

Regards,
Philip