Haskell Platform 2014.2.0.0 Release Candidate 2

[Sven Panne]

2014-07-28 16:40 GMT+02:00 Mark Lentczner <mark.lentczner at gmail.com>:
> The long anticipated Haskell Platform 2014.2 release, including GHC 7.8.3,
> and numerous updated packages, is almost here! [...]

I've tested the source tarball on Linux x86_64 with ghc-7.6.3 for
bootstrapping. The issues I've encountered:

   * To install the resulting HP somewhere different from /usr/local,
I've edited osHpPrefix and osGhcPrefix in hptool/src/OS/Internal.hs.
If a slightly extended Internal.hs (recognizing e.g. a
--prefix=/my/cool/path argument) won't make it into the final platform
release, this should at least be documented in a prominent place.
Otherwise non-root users won't be happy.

   * The "notes" subdirectory is missing, but the README points to it.

   * The paths in build/product/generic.tar.gz are wrong: They contain
a leading "target/". It's not a big deal with GNU tar where you can
specify --strip-components=1, but this should be fixed.

   * Mentioning parallel builds via a -j argument for platform.sh
should be mentioned in the docs, I guess almost nobody still has a
single core CPU nowadays.

   * Item [3] in the README mentions that haddock is missing, but if I
see this correctly, the resulting generic.tar.gz contains both the
haddock executable and all generated docs. Probably the comment is
simply out of date.

   * Why do we have the xhtml package in the HP itself? GHC 7.8.3
already contains the exact same version. Unless I missed something, we
should remove xhtml from the HP.

   * After unpacking generic.tar.gz, I had to register the HP packages with

        cd etc/registrations && for i in *; do test $i ==
"xhtml-3000.2.1" ||  ghc-pkg-7.8.3 register --force $i; done

     Having to use --force is a bit ugly, is there a nicer way?
Anyway, documenting this step in the README would be nice.