ghc status and plans

[Gregory Wright]

Hi Everyone,

My patch to fix the ghc Mach-O linker was accepted last week.  This will 
finally
allow building ghc 6.12.3 and the upcoming 7.0.1 on Snow Leopard.  The 
linker
bug not only prevented the interactive interpreter from building, but 
kept libraries
that used template haskell (ghc's macro processor) from building.

 From the regression tests, the build quality of 7.0.1 should be good 
enough from
production use.

As soon as I get 6.12.3 ported, my intention is to update the haskell 
platform to the
current version.  I would like to move the haskell libraries from devel 
to a new top level
haskell directory.  My plan is to support the most two recent versions 
of the platform.
This will require quite a few explicitly versioned ports, but the 
situation isn't really any
worse than for Python, for which we have py25 and py26 ports.

I am asking for comments and guidance on how to make this change go 
smoothly.
(Or, if the haskell ports should just be left where they are, I'm OK 
with that too.)
Once the current version of the compiler is available, it will be 
possible to add quite
a few ports which depend on ghc being at 6.12.3 or later.

Best,
Greg

-- 
Gregory Wright
Antiope Associates LLC
18 Clay Street
Fair Haven, New Jersey 07704
USA

+1 (732) 924-4549
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