building, rebuilding, problems, ALUT,..

[Simon Marlow]

Claus Reinke wrote:
> after a long while, i'm trying to update and rebuild my local ghc HEAD 
> (windows).
> as usual, there are problems:

incedentally, we now have various Windows nightly builds, including the test 
suite, so Windows-specific breakagaes should be much less common.

> 1. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Building/Rebuilding
> 
>    suggests that one does 'make distclean' _after_ pulling changes.
> 
>    - this currently fails in libraries (missing target)
>    - in general, doesn't the old setup that know better what to clean 
> than the new one?

Good point; now fixed.

> 2. filepath has been added sometime after my last attempt

Ian knows more than me about what should happen here.

> 3. windows configure has acquired yet another extra option, it seems. 
> why can't
>    i just run ./configure and have it find the right things in the PATH, 
> as on other
>    platforms?

Right, I quite agree, the default build/host should be mingw on Windows.  I 
remember looking into this at some point and concluding that it wasn't easy for 
some reason (I forget exactly why).  Some people (like me) have the cygwin tools 
in their path and use --with-gcc to specify the path to the mingw gcc.

> 5. what is the current state of the art with packaging up the finished 
> windows build?
>    it used to be 'make binary-dist Project=Ghc', followed by 
> 'prep-bin-dist-mingw',
>    and that is still what the build instructions say,

1. set BIN_DIST=1 in mk/build.mk
2. build as normal
3. 'make binary-dist'

that's all; you're left with a .tar.bz2 that you can unpack anywhere in your 
filesystem.  The binary-dist target now runs prep-bin-dist-mingw automatically, 
and I fixed up the latter to find its mingw bits in the usual locations; if you 
don't have mingw in the usual locations you may have to set some env variables, 
take a look at the prep-bin-dist-mingw script.  We plan do get rid of step (1) 
above soon too.

>    http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Building/Windows

I'll update the page.

Cheers,
	Simon