Hi Mathieu, you can! See http://hackage.mobilehaskell.org/; it's been one of the design goals I had when I was hacking on hadrian. The whole configure && make install shenanigans were just too much. Initially I wanted to drop that outright, but was convinced that configure and make install is something distributions want (that install into different locations) as well as some people who prefer to install into ghc into custom locations.
GHC has for a while now had relocatable support on our major platforms, which means you don't even need that wrapper script anymore as long as the bin and lib folder are next to each other and you operating system can find the path of the executable. I'm told AIX can't if the executable is a symlink. I'm all for having "unpack and run" bindists with an optional configure && make install phase for those who want it. As we are moving over to hadrian as the primary build system I think this should work, but might have regressed? Cheers, Moritz On Fri, Aug 7, 2020 at 9:50 PM Mathieu Boespflug <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi all, > > GHC currently has 3 tier-1 platforms: Linux, macOS and Windows. I'll focus > the dicussion below on these three platforms. The binary distributions for > Linux and macOS are designed to be unpacked, then the user types ./configure > && make install. This is not the case for Windows. > > On all platforms it's possible to create "relocatable" installations, such > that GHC doesn't really care where it's installed, and commands will still > work if the install directory changes location on the filesystem. So my > question is, why do we have a ./configure step on Linux and macOS? Why could > we not have bindists for all platforms that work like the Windows one? I.e. a > binary distribution that you just unpack, in any directory of your choice, > without any configuration or installation step. > > > _______________________________________________ > ghc-devs mailing list > [email protected] > http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs _______________________________________________ ghc-devs mailing list [email protected] http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs
