[nhc-bugs] Re: The nhc98 package for NetBSD (update to 1.18)

[Krister Walfridsson]

On Sun, 1 May 2005, Jesper Louis Andersen wrote:

> I am reporting on a number of issues with the package. The rationale for this
> report is to inform various parties of the problems I have encountered, so
> they can be thought of in later releases. As a consequence the emphasis of
> this mail will target the build system, the system infrastructure at york(!)
> and interfacing with NetBSD in general. Communication often makes the
> difference between a success and failure when porting software. I also hope
> Krister does not feel I have hi-jacked his work.

No problem.  I have not had much time lately, and know that the pkgsrc
Haskell stuff has bit rotted.  And it is always nice to hear that
the packages are used!  :-)


> The first problem with updating the package is the retrieval phase. This is
> done by a program, ftp(1), which will try to fetch the file
> ftp://ftp.cs.york.ac.uk/pub/haskell/nhc98/nhc98src-1.18.tar.gz. Unfortunately,
> this fails because the york ftp-server and ftp(1) agrees on entering
> Extended Passive Mode (EPRT and EPSV as per RFC 2428) which I then suspect the
> york firewall to disallow. Note that programs such as FreeBSDs fetch(1) and
> wget(1) of GNU chooses not entering EPRT/EPSV mode; thus having no problems
> fetching the source code.
>
> The direct solution to this problem would be to fix the firewall. We could
> add a workaround into the packages fetching process, but this has a number
> of implications. First, it is not the correct solution to the problem. Second,
> the fetching is generalized and not necessarily done by ftp(1). Altering
> the options given to the ${FETCH_COMMAND} is not portable if another
> retrieval program is chosen.

Hmm.  I didn't get this problem when downloading the files.  I suggest
not adding a workaround in pkgsrc --  the file will be mirrored
on ftp.netbsd.org for those who has problems (and pkgsrc will use
this mirror automagically in case of problems with the master site).


> The next problem I ran into in the upgrade process from 1.16 is a number of
> old patches we put on the source code before compiling. The patches are
> all laid out at the following url:
>
> http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/pkgsrc/lang/nhc98/patches/
>
> I will write [aa] for patch-aa, [ab] for patch-ab and so forth. Here is my
> findings. [aa] concerns an addition of $LDFLAGS to the curses compilation. This
> is done because the NetBSD package system can set further linker directives
> in this variable and we need to honour them. [ab] concerns an errornous way
> of calling abort(3). This is fixed in 1.18 and can go away. [ac, ad, af, ag]
> are all patches from the nhc98 homepage for nhc1.16. These are obviously not
> needed for 1.18 and can go away. [ae] does not seem to apply anymore. I am
> on a -current NetBSD and had no build problems. [ah] adjusts for $(CC) by
> substituting it for $(BUILDCOMP). I think this is the correct solution, so
> I have adapted that one.
>
> That is all. Unless I get complaints from any department - I will submit
> a change to the NetBSD bug-tracker in a couple of days.

I actually made essentially the same changes to my local source
tree a couple of days ago, and am planning to commit them to
pkgsrc later today, after I have tested it on some more
platforms...

     /Krister