From owner-freebsd-ports Fri Sep 10 7:26:43 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org Received: from mail4.microsoft.com (mail4.microsoft.com [131.107.3.122]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 36EFE14E7E for ; Fri, 10 Sep 1999 07:26:40 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from simonmar@microsoft.com) Received: from 157.54.9.103 by mail4.microsoft.com (InterScan E-Mail VirusWall NT); Fri, 10 Sep 1999 07:25:45 -0700 (Pacific Daylight Time) Received: by INET-IMC-04 with Internet Mail Service (5.5.2524.0) id ; Fri, 10 Sep 1999 07:26:04 -0700 Message-ID: <8B57882C41A0D1118F7100805F9F68B51232C0DD@RED-MSG-45> From: Simon Marlow To: "'ports@freebsd.org'" Subject: How to go about making a compiler port Date: Fri, 10 Sep 1999 07:26:01 -0700 X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2524.0) Sender: owner-freebsd-ports@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Hi Folks, I'd like to make a port for our Haskell compiler, GHC (see http://reserach.microsoft.com/users/t-simonm/ghc). There are some subtle problems with this: - GHC depends on itself. That is, you need GHC installed in order to build GHC. - GHC depends on Happy, our parser generator. - Happy depends on GHC (it's written in Haskell). So, one solution would be to provide a binary port, say ghc-bin, which would install a binary distribution. I checked the modula-3 port, and it doesn't seem to have a binary port, so what's the accepted way of doing this? It's possible to bootstrap GHC from intermediate C files, but it's a bit fiddly and I'd prefer not to do this if possible. However, one thing that occurs to me is that the port could bootstrap itself from C if you say 'make BOOTSTRAP=YES', and otherwise attempt to build using an installed GHC. Any thoughts greatly appreciated. I'm not on this list, BTW. Cheers, Simon To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-ports" in the body of the message