Building the Platform

[Mark Lentczner]

The current build of the platform has grown over the years to a somewhat
convoluted collection of shell scripts, makefiles, autoconf, and some
custom Haskell. It is further complicated by three distinct stages: making
the source distribution, building the packages, bundling for distribution.
Lastly, I suspect that each distribution (Mac, Windows, and n × unix-like)
has it's own path through these stages.

I've done some amount of rework on the process over the last two years, but
I'm thinking it is time for wholesale replacement. I'm considering using
Shake <http://community.haskell.org/~ndm/shake/> to replace all three
stages as one build. Distributions could choose to either re-cast their
process into this Shake program, or work from the source distribution.

The source distribution currently contains scripts and other bits for
generically building the platform from source. I currently have no way to
know which parts of those bits people rely on for their distributions. This
transition would substantially change what is shipped with the source
release.

*Packagers & Those of you that build the platform from source:*
Can you tell me which of these three directions for the source distribution
you'd like:

   - Bare: Just the package sources and a .cabal file, than you.
   - Scripted: Like the current distribution, shell/make/autoconf scripts
   that build the platform for some idealized unix-like system.
   - Programmatic: Include a Haskell program (perhaps Shake based) that
   builds the platform

I'm interested in hearing how people use the source distribution, and/or if
people use the repo directly to build. If I hear crickets, I'll take that
as free-reign to hatch evil schemes!

— Mark
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