renamed GMP symbols in GHC

[Matthias Kilian]

On Wed, Jan 04, 2012 at 12:31:23PM +0000, Joachim Breitner wrote:
> > One potential problem is that some Linux distributions really don't like 
> > it if you bundle modified versions of external libraries.  However, I 
> > just don't see a way around this: [...]
[...]
> I guess this means me... Indeed Debian has the policy to avoid modified
> bundled libraries, if somehow possible. For example, we patch the build
> system to use the system-provided libffi.

This policy isn't even specific to linux distributions ;-)

I don't know about the package building infrastructure for debian
or fedora, but for openbsd (where i'm doing a lot of haskell stuff),
it would be enough if the ghc sources would include not only a
(patched or unpatched) gmp source tree but also the ghc-specific
patches to gmp.

The rationale behind this polcicy (for openbsd, i can't speak for
debian): if there are 42 packages where the source distribution
files contain their own (probably patched) version of gmp, and
suddenly a critical patch has to be applied to gmp, we would have
to apply it 43 times (for gmp itself and for all the 42 packages
using a bundled gmp). If the source distribution files contained
diffs for gmp, we could (at least try to) extract our patched gmp
and apply the diff on top of it. => less work, any openbsd-specific
patch automatically will be applied to all 42 packages.

Ciao,
	Kili