[Haskell-cafe] Issue building ghc on NetBSD/amd64

[Donn Cave]

Quoth lhagan <lhagan99 at gmail.com>,

> Just tried changing the flag in build.mk, but I get the same error. Also,
> I'm pretty sure I need the --enable-hc-boot flag. Without it, I
> get: configure: error: GHC is required unless bootstrapping from .hc files.

Unless I've missed a whole lot of progress on this matter, it's going
to be much more work than just getting the flags right.

Several years ago, I managed to build 6.8, by starting with an OpenBSD
port of 6.6 as an hc donor, and of course building 6.6 on NetBSD, and
then using 6.6 to build 6.8.  There's a great deal of debugging and
patching that needs to be done in the process, some of it already done
for i386 and some novel to amd64.  I presented it to the NetBSD Haskell
maintainer, but obviously it's a low priority - I think in the intervening
years, you're the second person to mention it.  If that individual
(whose identity I can't recall at the moment) has a working NetBSD/amd64
port at this time, of any version, that would be extremely helpful;
unfortunately I don't, I think my amd64 hardware is defunct.  (I don't
think I got the interpreter working, by the way, and that also usually
means no haddock, etc.)

Today, you'd be obliged to follow the same course, but probably would have
to build one or two intermediate GHC versions as I doubt that 6.6 could
build the current version.  I understand the current version is not able
to be bootstrapped from hc files at all.

	Donn