Re: Removing old ghc* packages

[David Holland <dholland-pkgusers%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Wed, Jan 29, 2025 at 02:14:31PM +0100, Thomas Klausner wrote:
 > This is a heads-up that we'll be removing the following packages:
 > 
 > lang/ghc7
 > lang/ghc80
 > lang/ghc84
 > lang/ghc88
 > lang/ghc810
 > lang/ghc90
 > 
 > (broken on NetBSD 10) in a week. These packages were previously used
 > for bootstrapping newer ghc versions. Nowadays the recommended method
 > is to cross-compile the same, previous, or second-to-last version on a
 > supported platform.  and keeping these packages working is not
 > useful. Also, some current Haskell code won't even compile with them.
 > 
 > (Please note that even ghc7 was not bootstrappable from C.)
 > 
 > This was approved by the MAINTAINER pho@.

For the record, should anyone ever want to bring these back as part of
trying to restore a bootstrap chain, I have (somewhere) a rework of
lang/ghc (which was ghc6) that made its C bootstrap more robust. I
don't remember what the state of bootstrapping the ghc7 package with
ghc6 was, though, other than there being something problematic about
it.

-- 
David A. Holland
dholland%netbsd.org@localhost