Hurd stabilty: compiling ghc6

[Svante Signell]

Hi,

I've started the work of getting the Debian ghc6 (and ghc7) packages up
to date. This is really a mess I promise you, since ghc is a compiler
and is depending on itself. Partial results will be reported later.
(Maybe cross compiling is a better solution, time will show.)

However, when compiling under kvm, the compilation either freezes, exits
due to exceptions or Hurd just hangs. I have been looking at the memory
and disk usage and found no problem here, memory allocated is 1-1.5GB
and free space is around 4GB. Looks like Hurd bugs out randomly under
heavy load. (I don't think the problem is due to qemu-kvm?)

Another annoying thing that the Debian package build commands are too
coarse grained:

dpkg-buildpackage -b: configures, complies and builds the package (if
successful)

dpkg-buildpackage -b -nc: skips the configure stage only. 
Compile starts from the beginning, not where it failed. This is
extremely time-consuming in case of compile problems. 

I can of course run the generated makefiles manually, but do not
generally know in which order to run them. The most annoying part is
that even if the libraries and executables are successfully built by
manual intervention, the build-stamp is not created. Does manually
creating it make dpkg-buildpackage happy to continue building the
package??

Same applies to running debian/rules directly.