Unregistered builds broken? (Was: ANNOUNCE: GHC 7.4.1 Release Candidate 1)

[Joachim Breitner]

Dear GHC team,

I tried to fix these problems myself, and three of the bugs had more or
less trivial solutions (that hopefully are right):

http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/5733
http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/5735
http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/5734

However, this makes this build failure appear on those arches as well:

> > ghc-stage1: panic! (the 'impossible' happened)
> >   (GHC version 7.4.0.20111219 for sparc-unknown-linux):
> > 	pprGlobalReg: Unsupported register: CCCS

http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/5732

It seems that unregistered builds are generally broken, and that this is
not specific to exotic architectures. Are unregistered builds still
supported? Is this likely to be fixed for 7.4.1?

Please note that support for non-x86-arches is not just an academic
exercise: For example, I have a NAS device with an arm CPU (a NSLU2)
that happily runs git-annex¹, which is written in Haskell.

I wonder if we can help you in general with keeping these arches
supported, e.g. by setting up build bots for GHC. Would that be
possible? What would need to be done for that? Would a virtual machine
on (some of) these arches that you can manage yourself be helpful? I’m
not sure what Debian can do here, but if I know the requirements, I can
talk to the right people.

Greetings,
Joachim

¹ http://git-annex.branchable.com/


-- 
Joachim "nomeata" Breitner
Debian Developer
  nomeata at debian.org | ICQ# 74513189 | GPG-Keyid: 4743206C
  JID: nomeata at joachim-breitner.de | http://people.debian.org/~nomeata
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