Making GHC work on BSD

[Thorkil Naur]

Hello,

On Monday 08 September 2008 14:22, Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:
> Dear BDS hackers
> 
> We'd like GHC to be buildable on BSD, but at the moment it isn't.  We 
support GHC on Linux, Windows, Mac, but we really need help with BSD.

I would like to do something about this. I have (a number of) x86s that either 
have some FreeBSD version installed or could get such an installation without 
too much trouble. The easiest one has an (admittedly old) 5.4 FreeBSD 
installed, that machine is running at the moment, it has actually managed to 
build

> tn at tn21$ compiler/stage2/ghc-inplace --version
> The Glorious Glasgow Haskell Compilation System, version 6.9.20080517

using

> tn at tn21$ ghc --version
> The Glorious Glasgow Haskell Compilation System, version 6.4.1

and

> tn at tn21$ compiler/stage2/ghc-inplace --interactive
> GHCi, version 6.9.20080517: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/  :? for help
> Loading package ghc-prim ... linking ... done.
> Loading package integer ... linking ... done.
> Loading package base ... linking ... done.
> Prelude> 2+2
> 4

works sometimes, but validate is a catastrophy (this is a dormant project). 
Another machine has some FreeBSD 6.x (I haven't checked), but I don't think 
it has any GHC running on it at the moment. A third possibility would be to 
take the latest (7.0) FreeBSD and install that.

So, it would be useful to know, which FreeBSD version would you prefer to use 
for this?

> ...

Best regards
Thorkil