haskell 7 world -> moving to 8!

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Fri, 13 Sep 2019 at 04:02, Ken Cunningham
<ken.cunningham.webuse at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2019-09-12, at 7:51 AM, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
>
>
>
> Cool!
>
> Doesn't it work if you simply use this working ghc-bootstrap to build version 8?
> Or is Haskell too picky about what version of compiler you require to
> build something newer, and you can only go forward one tiny step at a
> time?
>
>
> The Haskell bootstrap rule appears to be two major steps at a time, and for whatever reason they skip odd numbered minor versions.
>
> Bootstrapping up to a current ghc from our previous ghc 7.8.3 looks like it may not be overly difficult, in the end, at least it went pretty smoothly:
>
> $ port -v installed ghc
> The following ports are currently installed:
>   ghc @7.8.3_6 platform='darwin 10' archs='x86_64' date='2017-11-19T13:47:09-0800'
>   ghc @8.0.2_0 (active) platform='darwin 10' archs='x86_64' date='2019-09-12T18:04:13-0700'
>
>
> It all goes pretty easily, but it does take some time.
>
> This ghc compiler I'm building looks like it should work on all 64bit systems 10.6+, I think. Have to see.

We would need to put the generated binary somewhere and use that one
for the actual/final build from the Portfile. That would speed up
things for everyone ...

> I think this might deliver a newer ghc 8.6.3 for older systems (actually 8.8.1 is out now, so I might just go all the way to there)  and then once we have a bootstrap we can just use the current haskell infrastructure & stack.

> On the way-out-there fringe, who knows about i386: There is an 8.8.1  i386 bootstrap binary for debian, so it appears possible to ponder that, at least.

On 10.6 it might in fact be possible to cross-compile for both i386
and PPC. At least their official suggestion is to cross-compile from a
platform that already works.

Mojca