gcc version to use on sparc/solaris

[Duncan Coutts]

On Sun, 2009-01-11 at 14:48 +0000, Duncan Coutts wrote:

> I built four versions of gcc and used them to build ghc-6.8.3.

While on the subject, the annoyances I bumped into while doing this are:

discovering a ghc/gcc combination does not work is not obvious. The
first symptom is ./configure failing to find the path to top of build
tree. Of course I realised this happened to be because we build a
Haskell pwd program during configure. It'll confuse other users. It
would be nice if after detecting the location and version of
ghc, ./configure would explicitly test that ghc to make sure it can
compile, link and run a hello world program. Each of these stages can
fail. On different occasions I've managed to get all three stages to
fail independently so it would be nice if each were checked explicitly.
The compile phase can fail if the ghc/gcc combo is bad. The link phase
can fail if the ghc cannot find libgmp/libreadline/libwhatever. The run
phase can fail if the ghc/gcc combo generated bad code or if the libgmp
is not on the runtime linker path but was on the static linker path.

It's rather tricky to configure ghc to use libraries from a non-standard
location, one that is not on the standard linker link-time or runtime
paths. See http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/2933

It's tricky to get configure ghc to use gcc from a non-standard
location. The ./configure --with-gcc flag works for gcc used at build
time but the installed ghc still uses ghc from the $PATH.


Duncan