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

[Malcolm Wallace]

"Jesper Louis Andersen" <jlouis at mongers.org> writes:

> I assume this is the correct mailing list to send a report of my workings
> on nhc98 to get an updated NetBSD port.

Yes.  Thanks for the report.

> 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.

I have received several reports over the last two or three years,
complaining that people have been unable to retrieve packages by FTP.
Yet, the logs clearly showed that many other people were successful with
FTP, so we have been unable to track down the problem.  Your explanation
sounds very plausible - I will pass it on our support staff, who will
be able to investigate further and hopefully resolve this issue at last.

> The obvious way to bootstrap nhc98 would be by gcc. Unfortunately, NetBSDs
> package tree can select the compiler to be something other than gcc. The
> reason is the portability of NetBSD. If running on another architecture than,
> say i386, one could choose a native compiler over gcc for compilation. As a
> consequence $(CC) is set to be ``cc'' when compiling the nhc98 Makefile; not
> ``gcc'' as expected. My crude solution were to oversteer $(CC) and substitute
> it for ${BUILDCOMP}, see patches further down.

If you set the $(CC) variable at configure-time, I think the Makefiles
should work OK - if not, then it is a bug.

    $ CC=cc ./configure --buildwith=$CC
    $ make basic

It is possible that the configure script needs a small patch for this to
work in all situations.  (attached)

> Can nhc98 be compiled by anything else than nhc98? Have you tried? I can
> alter the package to constrain itself to certain compilers in the case of
> impossibility.

Yes, nhc98 can be built with ghc, and hbc, in addition to itself.  But
perhaps you meant to ask whether it can be bootstrapped with a C
compiler different from gcc?  It certainly did at one time build with
Sun's and SGI's proprietary C compilers, but neither of those has been
tried for a few years.

Regards,
    Malcolm
-------------- next part --------------
Index: configure
===================================================================
RCS file: /home/cvs/root/nhc98/configure,v
retrieving revision 1.116
diff -u -r1.116 configure
--- configure	11 Mar 2005 09:32:56 -0000	1.116
+++ configure	2 May 2005 12:48:23 -0000
@@ -325,6 +325,7 @@
     hbc|xtc)   RTSFLAG=no;;
     ghc*|nhc*) RTSFLAG=yes;;
     gcc)       RTSFLAG=yes;;
+    cc)        RTSFLAG=yes;;
   esac
   echo "nhc98comp uses RTS delimiters?              $RTSFLAG"
   if [ "$BUILDOPTS" != "" ]