ANNOUNCE: GHC version 6.8.3 binary-dists

[Simon Marlow]

Christian Maeder wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I've created the following binary distributions, but -- like Serge 
> Mechveliani -- I'm not very happy with the results, because the created 
> binaries are much bigger.
> 
> http://www.dfki.de/sks/hets/pc-solaris/ghcs/ghc-6.8.3-i386-unknown-solaris2.tar.bz2 
> 
> http://www.dfki.de/sks/hets/pc-solaris/ghcs/ghc-6.8.3-tests.log.bz2
> 
> http://www.dfki.de/sks/hets/mac/ghcs/ghc-6.8.3-powerpc-apple-darwin.tar.bz2
> http://www.dfki.de/sks/hets/mac/ghcs/ghc-6.8.3-tests.log.bz2
> 
> The log files contain the results of running "(g)make stage=2" in 
> testsuite/tests/ghc-regress. The summaries are below.
> 
> The Tiger Mac OS PPC (8.11.0 Darwin) distribution relies on 
> libreadline.5.2.dylib and libncurses.5.dylib under /opt/local/lib/. 
> libgmp.a is statically linked in.
> 
> Due to the increased code sizes it is more likely to get "relocation 
> overflow" (therefore this distribution does not work for our hets 
> project). http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/2031
> 
> For i386 Solaris it would be good to have a GHC build slave to improve 
> the testsuite results (below) and to avoid building problems (that Ian 
> Lynagh helped to resolve before. Thanks!).
> 
> The sizes of our compressed hets binaries increased as follows:
>                  ghc-6.8.2   ghc-6.8.3
> i386-Solaris       10   Mb     16 Mb
> i386-Darwin         7   Mb     13 Mb
> i386-Linux          7.2 Mb     10 Mb
> 
> (i.e. compare http://www.dfki.de/sks/hets/linux/daily/ with
> a recent http://www.dfki.de/sks/hets/linux/versions/)

That's odd - I measured binary sizes thoroughly before the release and 
didn't see any difference between 6.8.3 and 6.8.2.

Perhaps -split-objs got lost somewhere?  Or maybe you upgraded gcc at some 
point?

Cheers,
	Simon