Re: Bootstrapping GHC

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Nikita Karetnikov <nikita@karetnikov.org> skribis:

> I’ve been thinking about GHC recently.  (A quick reminder: there are
> binary versions [1], but we can’t use them because some binaries point
> to ‘/bin/sh’.)  I believe the following should work for x86_64 and i686:

I don’t know GHC, but apparently it can be bootstrapped from
intermediate generated C files:

  http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/6.4.1/html/building/sec-porting-ghc.html

Wouldn’t that be better than fiddling with binaries out-of-band?

> Questions:
>
> 1. We’d have to host the binaries (step 2) somewhere and repeat the
>    process whenever the hash of ‘/bin/sh’ changes.  How often will this
>    happen?

The hash of /bin/sh?  Where did you see /bin/sh?  :-)

> 2. Does Guix allow to fetch files from multiple places?  Is it possible
>    to use ‘url-fetch’ plus a local file?  Could you show an example?

The ‘uri’ argument can be a list:

  (origin
    (method url-fetch)
    (uri (list "http://..." "file://..."))
    (sha256 ...))

However, ‘url-fetch’ doesn’t support file://.

The other option would be to allow ‘source’ to be a list; that’s easily
implemented, just not done yet.

HTH,
Ludo’.