ghc package bootstrapping

[David Woodhouse]

On Mon, 2005-02-14 at 00:36 +0900, Jens Petersen wrote:
>I just talked to the Debian maintainer of ghc,
>and he told me that Debian bootstraps ghc on new
>archs with binary packages of his binary ports.
>So I would like to add ghc to Extras initially with
>the above package based on upstream's installable
>binary for Linux/i386 (with configure and a Makefile fwiw).

There are Debian binary packages for x86_64 and PPC too. Please include
both of those.

The way that Modula-3 handles bootstrapping on a new platform is to
include the bootstrap compiler in assembly form and then compile it,
instead of distributing binaries. 

That approach makes me feel slightly happier because it at least 'feels'
like source code, but I suppose there's no real reason for that.
Distributing as assembly can give problems with symbol versioning -- see
the hoops I had to jump through to get the bootstrap compiler to use
_setjmp at GLIBC_2.0 in ezm3 to get cvsup building on PPC, for example.

I was toying with the idea of a portable bootstrap compiler generated by
an M3->Java compiler. But then I started to feel queasy... :)

-- 
dwmw2