RE: the woes of non-cvs haskellers

Hi Claus.

| A broader approach would be to try and show a united Haskell
| tools front to the general Haskeller: Identify a core set of Haskell
| tools (the above four would be my initial suggestion), and make
| sure that the latest binary releases for these are always in synch
| with each other.

...

| On Windows at least, it seems that everyone
| is relying on Sigbjorn to do all the packaging - couldn't the
| creation of updated installers be automated (or Haskellised),
| so that he'd only have to be bothered for the initial packaging,
| not for patchlevel updates?

I agree that it would be good to make coordinated releases of some set of
the GHC tools.

In particular, it would bring that rather excellent tool Hdirect into the
spotlight which I think would be a good thing - for example, a binding to a
substantial portion of the Win32 library should be be buildable from the
Visual Basic type libraries available on the web.

Towards the end of last year I started experimenting with modified "nightly"
build scripts to build in one fell swoop ghc (and it's libraries), alex,
happy, greencard and hdirect.

I backed off for three reasons, one was other tasks, the second was that I
felt I was possibly going off on a tangent that no-one else was interested
in (at least as far as the approach I took - that is, using the CVS nightly
build scripts - was concerned) and the third was that I still find building
GHC on Windows a hit and miss affair.  A number of build messages from this
project made it to the GHC CVS mailing list at the time.

Modulo bugs (I can only test on Windows and syncing the Hdirect libraries
with the GHC-inplace version, rather than the version of the bootstrap
compiler eluded me), those changes are backward compatible with the usual
nightly builds so there should be no problems for those who want to work as
usual.

If everyone thinks that these changes might be helpful, I will bring them up
to date and check them in.


| In other words, someone could go download
| them, make a "Haskell tools, Spring 2004" CD, and be sure that
| they actually work together while he/she's trying to learn Haskell.

Unfortunately I'm unable to do this myself, but the above changes should
make the task more automatable.

Cheers

Mike Thomas.