porting to uClibc-based 686 Linux

[Dubiousjim]

Just to follow-up on my earlier emails about trying to port GHC to a
uClibc-based Linux, I finally did get this working, on both x86 and
x86_64.

There were a bunch of small stumbling blocks and one big one that I
finally traced to the fact that the native gcc on my target system had
the Gentoo hardening patches, and one needed to supply a "-nopie" option
to selectively disable these. (This was counter-intuitive because the
error messages made it seem that what was wanted was to *enable* PIE
compiling, not to disable it.) I finally identified this issue when
reading http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/hardened/hardenedfaq.xml.

Anyway, I've written up what it took to port GHC to our system on our
distro's wiki:

http://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Porting_GHC_to_Alpine

Perhaps that might help others attempting similar feats, or might help
the ghc devs working on the build system to make this less painful in
the future.
-- 
dubiousjim at gmail.com