This is a fairly large module. It contains most of the GHC-specific code for
configuring, building and installing packages. It also exports a function
for finding out what packages are already installed. Configuring involves
finding the ghc and ghc-pkg programs, finding what language extensions
this version of ghc supports and returning a Compiler value.
getInstalledPackages involves calling the ghc-pkg program to find out
what packages are installed.
Building is somewhat complex as there is quite a bit of information to take
into account. We have to build libs and programs, possibly for profiling and
shared libs. We have to support building libraries that will be usable by
GHCi and also ghc's -split-objs feature. We have to compile any C files
using ghc. Linking, especially for split-objs is remarkably complex,
partly because there tend to be 1,000's of .o files and this can often be
more than we can pass to the ld or ar programs in one go.
There is also some code for generating Makefiles but the less said about
that the better.
Installing for libs and exes involves finding the right files and copying
them to the right places. One of the more tricky things about this module is
remembering the layout of files in the build directory (which is not
explicitly documented) and thus what search dirs are used for various kinds
of files.
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