Making GHC work on BSD

Donn Cave donn at avvanta.com
Mon Sep 8 12:10:27 EDT 2008


Quoth Simon Peyton-Jones <simonpj at microsoft.com>:
| Dear BDS hackers
...
| So this message is to say: if you'd like GHC on BSD, please help!  No help
| probably means no GHC.  Time is short before GHC 6.10.
...

| There's also one NetBSD-specific ticket:
|
| 2351    NetBSD defines ELF_ST_TYPE

In case I didn't express myself very well when I posted that ticket -
the ideal fix should be to replace the FreeBSD-specific support in the
amd64 case, with the non-platorm-specific logic that 6.8.3 has for the
i386 case.  There is no need for attention from a NetBSD expert.

| ... and one that I think applies to all the *BSDs:
|
| 2063    Breackage on OpenBSD due to mmap remap
|
| (actually the latter one is a top priority, because without it GHCi can't
| work, so we need it fixed for 6.10.1).

Is this a change from 6.8.3?  NetBSD currently provides 6.8.3 as an
optional package for NetBSD/i386 4.0, with ghci included and without
any mmap patches as far as I know.  It was also working for me on
NetBSD/amd64 (which is the platform that would actually need MAP_32BIT?)

NetBSD does require a number of other patches to build correctly -
I count 18, the bulk of which relate to 1) finding readline when
it isn't in a path automatically searched by the compiler, and
2) NetBSD renamed system functions.  (They also include the above
mentioned ELF_ST_TYPE patch.)  These patches are applied by the
NetBSD package maintainer, but are also available separately
through the package system.

	Donn Cave, donn at avvanta.com


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