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Last edited by Ben Gamari
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windows toolchain

This document describes the infrastructure for maintaining GHC's mingw64/mingw32 toolchain tarballs for Windows.

Why

On Windows, GHC binary distributions ship with a full C compiler/linker toolchain targetting the host platform. These tarballs are generated by the make sdist build rules and are derived from mingw toolchains built by the msys2 project. Unfortunately, GHC must patch around a variety of limitations of this toolchain to ensure reliable operation (specifically, working around the MAX_PATH limitation). For this, @Phyx has developed a patch utility.

Building the jailbreak utility

The following assumes a Windows machine with 32- and 64-bit toolchains installed:

$ MSYSTEM=MINGW64 bash --login -c "pacman -Suy mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc"
$ MSYSTEM=MINGW32 bash --login -c "pacman -Suy mingw-w64-i686-gcc"

In an msys2 shell

  1. git clone https://github.com/Mistuke/ghc-jailbreak
  2. cd ghc-jailbreak
  3. In a mingw64 shell: make
  4. In a mingw32 shell: make
  5. tar -czf ghc-jailbreak.tar.gz x86_64 i686

Building the toolchain tarballs

GHC's source tree contains a script, mk/get-win32-tarballs.sh, which is used to build and fetch GHC's toolchain tarballs. To build the toolchain tarballs,

$ mk/get-win32-tarballs.sh grab all
$ rm -f ghc-tarballs/mingw-w64/*/*-phyx.*
$ mk/get-win32-tarballs.sh patch
$ mk/get-win32-tarballs.sh hash > mk/win32-tarballs.md5sum
$ vim mk/get/win32-tarballs.sh
# [edit download_tarballs() to reflect the new version numbers]