How MD are .hi files?

[Simon Marlow]

Matthias Kilian wrote:
> On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 11:35:36AM +0100, Simon Marlow wrote:
>>> for an unregisterised ghc-6.8.2 (or newer), are the .hi files
>>> dependent (except for the 32 vs. 64 bit word size)? I had a quick
>>> look at the stuff in compiler/iface, but the only MD part I found
>>> was that 32/64 bit difference.
>> The word size is probably the only dependency, but there are many reasons 
>> that you can't just take the .hc/.hi files generated by an unregisterised 
>> build on one machine and expect them to work on another machine.
> 
> I really don't expect this. I just decided to be lazy and provide
> not only .hc files but also .hi files[1] for the OpenBSD port, and
> then I thought: "does this make sense at all? Can it even be of use
> for porting GHC to other archs on OpenBSD, or for the NetBSD folks
> working on GHC?"

Here's a message I wrote quite a while ago on this topic:

http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/glasgow-haskell-users/2005-May/008456.html

some of that is out of date, but at least it describes most of the issues 
with having a platform-independen hc bootstrap.

> [1] Of course, the correct solution would not need the .hi files,
> but just use the stage1 bootstrapped from .hc files to start
> rebuilding the libraries. But that would require even more hacking
> on the Makefiles, and I've already an insane amount of hacks sitting
> around.

If the .hc files were platform independent, then the .hi files would be 
too, by definition.

Cheers,
	Simon