Building system again

[Roman Leshchinskiy]

Hi Ian,


Ian Lynagh wrote:
>>   cd libraries
>>   darcs get http://darcs.haskell.org/packages/ndp
>>   cd ..
>>   <set up mk/build.mk>
>>   autoreconf
> 
> Are there docs somewhere that still tell you to run autoreconf?
> 
>>   sh boot
>>
>> This step is new and, of course, I skipped it on first try. The README 
>> mentions it but why is it necessary at all? Couldn't this be done as 
>> part of configure?
> 
> It runs autoreconf, for the root and also all of the libraries.

Ah, I didn't realise that it replaces autoreconf. I thought it was just 
supposed to be an additional step. Thanks for the clarification.

>>   configure
>>
>> Works, but the first line of output is strange:
>>
>> checking for GHC version date... darcs: getFdStatus: invalid argument 
>> (Bad file descriptor)
> 
> Does
> 
>     darcs changes --quiet --no-summary --xml | head -500 | grep 'date=' | sed "s/^.*date='\([0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]\).*$/\1/g" | sort -n | tail -1
> 
> give the same error? Hmm, I think that's really supposed to be "tail -n 1" - I wonder if that's what's causing the problem.

Indeed, even darcs changes --quiet --no-summary --xml | head -1 gives 
the same error, I assume because darcs tries to write to its stdout 
after head has closed its stdin. Looks like a darcs bug to me (FWIW, I'm 
using 1.0.8). Again, this is on OS X. BTW, head -1 and head -n 1 are the 
same on the systems I know of.

>> Also, IMO Haddock errors should never be treated as fatal by 
>> the build system.
> 
> When we're making releases or building distro packages we want the build
> to fail if making the docs fails. We also want a big flag at the very
> least during the nightly builds.

Yeah, I can see that. Still, it's rather annoying if I'm just doing a 
private build and it falls over because of haddock issues. I can live 
with it, though.

Thanks for fixing this stuff.

Roman