GHC on arches other that x86 and x86_64 (was Re: quickcheck and ghci)
Joachim Breitner wrote:
> Quickcheck started to use TH which is not available on all
> architectures, which causes problems. Do you really _need_ TH or could
> you, using some copy’n’pasting, achieve the same without? And if you
> really need it, could you imagine making it optional, via a flag?
I'm restricting this response to Debian people.
GHC is becoming quite problematic for platforms other than x86
and x86_64. The GHC git HEAD recently stopped working on
PowerPC [0] and possibly others. Unregistered builds (required by
all arches without a native code generator ie Sparc, MIPS, Arm
etc) is currently broken in git HEAD [1].
It seems that GHC HQ has little interest and no manpower to keep
GHC working on a bunch of arches that Debian cares about.
I have spent a considerable amount of time trying to get to the
bottom of GHC bug #5111 but GHC is one hell of a difficult and
complex beast to work on. I've made little progress and I currently
have little time to pusue this.
Peronally I find this really disappointing. Haskell is such a
fantastic language to write system utilities in that I would
love to see a bunch of Debian tools written in Haskell. However
if GHC doesn't support a bunch of arches that Debian thinks is
important, this is simply not going to happen.
Are people on this list aware of these problems? Are we simply
going to drop arches as the GHC upstream breaks them? Is there
any other solution?
Erik
[0] http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/5111
[1] http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/5145
--
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Erik de Castro Lopo
http://www.mega-nerd.com/
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