ghc 9.14.1 isn't buildable from tarball

Summary

(This is from a report on the FP Discord)

No, I downloaded ghc-9.14.1-src.tar.xz and worked from there.

So, it did not have boot, but ./configure worked well enough.

After I manually copied .cabal.in to .cabal in ghc-internal and ghc-experimental, the build progressed - and complained about missing DejaVu fonts, which are installed on my computer. Investigation showed that both conf.py did not define them correctly.

After fixing that too, build completed - although with a bunch of LaTeX errors, which probably impacted the quality of the output and made at least some text broken. For example, the table that lists the versions of the included libraries on page 13, is formatted differently - and takes a couple of pages less in the PDF that I generated. In total, my file has 893 pages in total, while the “good” one - 910.

So it sounds like

1. configure fails to initialize ghc-internal and ghc-experimental
2. something is wrong with finding fonts
3. something, possibly related, is wrong with users guide generation

For what it's worth, I built from git following the normal build rules aside from git switch -c ghc-9.14.1-release, and I didn't get errors about missing cabal files and my users_guide.pdf has the correct number of pages.

Steps to reproduce

tar xv ghc-9.14.1.tar.xz
./configure
hadrian/build -j docs --docs=no-haddocks --docs=no-sphinx-html --docs=no-sphinx-man

Expected behavior

It should build ghc and create users_guide.pdf.

Environment

• GHC version used: 9.12.2 (boot compiler)

Optional:

• Operating System: MacOS Tahoe 26.2
• System Architecture: AArch64
• Cabal 3.16.1.0, Stack 3.9.0.1, XCode 16.4