Re: Haskell in Debian
Hi.
On Wed, May 12, 1999 at 06:21:19PM +0200, Rui Zhu wrote:
> On Wed, May 12, 1999 at 07:00:31PM +0300, Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho wrote:
> > In related note, according to unofficial information from Simon Peyton
> > Jones (the primary author of GHC), the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC) will
> > become free RSN. Currently GHC has no license. I've tried to bootstrap
> > it but it is so big a beast that I'll probably let it pass. I hope
> > someone else packages it when it becomes free.
>
> It is good news though it is only unofficial one. I've tried to build
> 4.02, it took me 4 hours on my K6-233 box and costed more than 100MB
> disk. I'd like to apply to become a Debian maintainer and package it,
> if no one want to take it.
Well, for about the fifth time over the years, I'm having a go at
compiling ghc (I finally have plenty of disk and a decent amount of RAM).
I've hit two problems so far:
a) happy is unhappy [1]
I have mailed Simon M? regarding this. Binary is distributed for use
with libc5, "source" is distributed with a libc5-dependent bootstrap. I
couldn't compile from the source due to ghc being unhappy with the
options happy wanted (-fhaskell-1.3) and various hard-codings of the
ghc path and the ghc version.
I would happy to take on happy, once it's happy. This may just be a
case of the GHC people making their latest CVS snapshot available. Oh,
and there is the small question of the lack of a licence (I also queried
this).
b) ghc runs out of heap compiling its parser
The file ParseIface.hs (in ghc/compiler) needs more than 64M but no more
than 128M of heap to compile. With 64M of RAM and not too much else
(X and ntpd) running you are looking at 1500+ garbage collections for
about 1.5G of allocation. This file took 10-20 minutes on my machine.
If you have >64M of RAM you should probably be the maintainer. I'm
thinking of upgrading in the next month of so, funds permitting.
In any case, given the quantity of stuff that makes up ghc (the compiler,
the profiling tools, the parallel simulation package, etc.), some division
of labour might be sensible.
If that turns out to be a bad idea... well, I have an alpha on which
I could _try_ to get ghc up and running, presupposing a diff.gz and a
working bootstrap compiler. I would need to find some more memory for
the poor thing though.
Lastly, the ghc-users list seems to be rather quiet, but I've only just
subscribed.
Giuliano.
[1] note for the bemused: happy is a yacc for Haskell
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