RE: the woes of non-cvs haskellers

> 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.

Speaking from a GHC standpoint, your efforts were/are greatly
appreciated.  Probably the reason that building GHC on Windows is "a hit
and miss affair" is because we don't have the same level of constant
testing that happens with the Linux port: having a nightly build report
for the Windows build would help keep us aware of problems in the
Windows world as they crop up.

As far as packaging goes, it would definitely be useful if the output of
the nightly build on Windows was an installable .msi - I think Sigbjorn
has some tools to automate this process, but not sure if they're ready
for prime time yet (Sigbjorn?).  If we had this, then the .msi could be
published on the web along with the other development snapshots.

> 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.

Yes, please do this.

Cheers,
        Simon