ghc package bootstrapping

[Jens Petersen]

David Woodhouse wrote:
> There are Debian binary packages for x86_64 and PPC too. Please include
> both of those.

When will a ppc port be added to Fedora Core/Extras? :)

> 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.

For ghc it is possible to bootstrap with ghc-generated bootstrap C files.
But then it really just comes down to whether one trusts the ghc compiler
used to generate them over the binary from upstream/debian.
Also generating the bootstrap files is non trivial in practise - I managed it
for x86_64, but have had problems getting it working for i386...

So while I sympathise I think just using binary tarballs like debian
to bootstrap ghc for Extras will be easier and good enough.  Once we
have that in place, we should rebuild ghc completely from source anyway.

Jens