Bug#910664: Acknowledgement (ghc: ghc package can no longer be cross-compiled)

[Ilias Tsitsimpis]

Hi Helmut,

Thanks for offering to help with cross building. Let me first comment on
the following.

On Sun, Dec 10, 2023 at 09:01PM, Helmut Grohne wrote:
> While
> that you don't want to support cross building of ghc, would you mind
> others (like me) supporting it?

and

> Given that you (ghc
> maintainers) are evidently not interested in doing the work here, I also
> suggest that you close this bug when applying the patch and letting
> cross users file new bugs with new patches.

The above statements are not true. While rewriting d/rules to build GHC
using Hadrian, I tried very hard to implement cross-building for GHC. I
backported upstream fixes [1], engaged in upstream discussion about this
[2] and we concluded that the new Hadrian build system is not capable of
cross-building GHC [3]. Upstream is working on fixing this, but it's a
slow process [4].

This is why we have the error message there, and if you look at the
d/rules file, you will see it has comments that link to these upstream
issues.

With that said, I am happy to share everything I have seen while trying
to make cross-builds work, and we can work together to support this.

[1] https://salsa.debian.org/haskell-team/DHG_packages/-/blob/5e08edfeba1729c62d7292cdf47408de95a5b37c/p/ghc/debian/patches/fix-cross-compilation
[2] https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/issues/23975
[3] https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/issues/23975#note_526546
[4] https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/issues/23975#note_530201

Best,

-- 
Ilias