Building system again

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

| Finally, I'd like to point out that the recent changes to the build
| system have caused and continue to cause a lot of problems for us. I
| understand that refactoring the build system is a worthwhile task
| but it would be really great if it was less disruptive.

Yes, agreed.  As you know we've discussed this quite a bit in recent weeks.  It's not just the build system (though that is the most prominent recent example).  Furthermore, there is a quadratic law going on: doubling the number of active GHC developers doubles the chances that someone will commit a change that breaks other people's builds, *and* double the number of people who are thereby disrupted.

The current plan is to have a "last good build" snapshot Darcs repo.  If you pull from that, you'll know that Buildbot managed to build from start to finish without problems.

| Also, the lack of support for parallel make is
| really unfortunate as it significantly increases turn-around times in
| some cases (and is confusing to novice users, I guess).

Ian, would you like to take a look at this?  In these multicore days it seems like a Good Plan.

Simon