Re: [gwl-devel] Next steps for the GWL

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Hi simon,

> I agree that the mechanism such as `git-annex` should be nice.
> But is it not a mean for the CAS that we previously discussed?

I does not need to be the *only* mechanism.  Multiple backends can serve
different users.

> I fully agree with the features and their description. Totally cool!
> However, I am a bit reluctant with `git-annex` because it requires a
> Haskell compiler and it is far far from "bootstrapability". I am aware
> of the Ricardo's try---and AFIAK the only one. And here [1]
> explanations by one Haskeller.

This is off-topic, but I’m probably going to bite the bullet and simply
use GCC 2.x to build an old GHC 4.x from the C “source” files, which are
surprisingly close to actual source code.  I’ve tried to build GHC 4.x
with a recent compiler, but the code depends on too many quirks of GCC 2
that make it very hard to be sure about the behavior post migration.

(Re [1]: I talked to Joachim at one of the repro builds summit about the
GHC bootstrapping attempts, which prompted their blog post.)

--
Ricardo