[Fwd: Job for someone: make a VM image for GHC development]

[Simon Marlow]

On 15/07/2009 23:38, João Paulo Pizani Flor wrote:
> Hello people,
>
> I'm a great fan and user of Haskell since around one year ago, and have
> been using it for several personal and college tasks. I also use Linux a
> lot, and have been using several distros since around 2000.
>
> I am pretty interested in doing this VM image with a development
> environment, but I have a simple question about what's this all about:
> Are we setting up an environment for GENERAL developmente using Haskell,
> or rather is this VM image targeted at the SPECIFIC development of the
> Glasgow Haskell Compiler?
>
> In the first case, I already started some experimentation with Tiny Core
> Linux (around 10MB) and I'm now waiting to put the upcoming versions of
> GHC and The Platform on it :)

Either (or both!) would be useful.

I originally suggested this as a way to help people get involved with 
developing GHC itself.  They'd be able to

  - install VirtualBox
  - download the image, start it up
  - immediately have a GHC build ready to make changes and say "make"
  - update the sources with "./darcs-all pull"
  - validate
  - submit patches with "darcs send"

this would be a great way to make a small change to GHC and submit it, 
or experiment with GHC, or just to play around with a GHC build without 
the hassle of downloading all the repositories and the necessary tools. 
  Windows users could get a nicer GHC development environment and faster 
builds :)  Someone who intends to do a signficant amount of work on GHC 
would probably want to use a native setup, and spend some time 
customising their environment.  However, for the casual hacker, I think 
a VM would really help.

A VM with just the Platform, and perhaps a selection of other packages 
(eg. gtk2hs and glade) would be great too.  We could use this as the 
basis for a GHC development VM.

Cheers,
	Simon