Dear LLVM-Packaging-Team, Dear FTP-Masters, I’m maintaining the GHC package. GHC is the main Haskell compiler, and supports compiling via LLVM’s IR. For reasons well outlined at https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/ImprovedLLVMBackend they consider it impractical to support any arbitrary version of LLVM out there, as LLVM guarantees no stability in the IR code, and plan to bundle LLVM with GHC, possible with GHC-specific changes. They explicit want to hear our opinion on this, knowing about our avoid-code-copy-policy. Given the technicalities around it, I think they have a point and I don’t see what Debian could do different here, once upstream decides to go this way. Do you agree and can I give them a green light on this change? Greetings, Joachim -------- Weitergeleitete Nachricht -------- Von: Austin Seipp <austin@well-typed.com> An: ghc-devs@haskell.org <ghc-devs@haskell.org> Kopie: Joachim Breitner <mail@joachim-breitner.de>, Nathan Howell <nathan.d.howell@gmail.com>, Reid Barton <rwbarton@gmail.com>, Ben Gamari <bgamari.foss@gmail.com> Betreff: Proposal: Improving the LLVM backend by packaging it Datum: Fri, 24 Oct 2014 18:52:53 -0500 X-spam-score: -6.6 (------) Hi *, A few days ago a discussion on IRC occurred about the LLVM backend, its current status, and what we could do to make it a rock solid part of GHC for all our users. Needless to say, the situation right now isn't so hot: we have no commitment to version support, two major versions are busted, others are seriously buggy, and yet there are lots of things we could improve on. So I give you a proposal, from a few of us to you all, about improving it: https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/ImprovedLLVMBackend I won't repeat what's on the wiki page too much, but the TL;DR version is: we should start packaging a version of LLVM, and shipping it with e.g. binary distributions of GHC. It's just a lot better for everyone. I know we're normally fairly hesitant about things like this (shipping external dependencies), but I think it's the only sane thing to do here, and the situation is fairly unique in that it's not actually very complicated to implement or support, I think. We'd like to do this for 7.12. I've also wrangled some people to help. Those people know who they are (because they're CC'd), and I will now badger them into submission until it is fixed for 7.12. Please let me know what you think. PS. Joachim, I would be particularly interested in upstream needs for Debian, as I know of their standard packaging policy to not duplicate things. -- Regards, Austin Seipp, Haskell Consultant Well-Typed LLP, http://www.well-typed.com/ -- Joachim "nomeata" Breitner Debian Developer nomeata@debian.org | ICQ# 74513189 | GPG-Keyid: F0FBF51F JID: nomeata@joachim-breitner.de | http://people.debian.org/~nomeata
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