[darcs-users] GHC 6.8?

[Trent W. Buck]

Matthias Kilian <kili at outback.escape.de> writes:

> On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 07:24:36PM +0200, Yitzchak Gale wrote:
>>> ...under what circumstances would Debian stable users need to
>>> *compile* (as opposed to fetching a binary) *new* versions of Darcs?
>>> For the new bit, I think it would be if we were ever to release a
>>> version of Darcs that fixed some crucial bug (say a pending patch
>>> issue).
>>
>> What if there is a new feature or functionality that I happen to need
>> that is still only in HEAD? That has happened in the past.
>
> You can always build your own version of GHC newer than what your
> distribution provides. And if you tweak the GHC build configuration
> a little bit, it doesn't take the usual lot of time and memory to
> build. For example, you can disable library and rts ways for debugging
> and profiling, and you can also omit building the documentation
> (which takes *lot* of memory) buy putting this into mk/build.mk before
> building GHC:
>
> 	SplitObjs=NO
> 	GhcLibWays=v	# For GHC <= 6.10, omit the `v'
> 	GhcRTSWays=
> 	HADDOCK_DOCS=NO
> 	LATEX_DOCS=NO
> 	BUILD_DOCBOOK_HTML=NO
>
> Note that you can't build GHC-6.12 or newer with GHC-6.6, you *have* to
> build GHC-6.10 first and then use it to build GHC-6.12 (or newer).

I bootstrapped 6.12 from 6.10 from 6.8 on Ubuntu Hardy to generate a
statically-linked Darcs binary for one of the GHC guys to use on the
platform.  At most it took me a full afternoon, and that's without any
experience building GHC from source.

If you MUST track Debian Stable, and MUST run the latest Darcs release,
expending an afternoon per Darcs release (bi-annually) doesn't seem
unreasonable to me.