Support for building with ghc-8.8.1

[peti]

All my attempts to build stack with ghc-8.8.1 have failed. cabal install stack will usually fail while compiling pantry and I am not aware of any way to work around or fix that issue.

openSUSE Linux is about to switch to ghc-8.8.1, which means that the distribution can no longer compile stack. So we would have to drop the tool from our distribution, which feels like a shame.

Could you please advice what to do about this situation?

[jwaldmann]

It looks like this is work in progress at commercialhaskell/pantry#6

[qrilka]

That one is merged and #5167 should make Stack buildable with GHC-8.8.2

[jwaldmann]

cabal install stack will usually fail while compiling pantry

I was running into this recently. I found this simple work-around (after too many failed attempts - that's why I am documenting it here)

get sources off hackage via cabal unpack stack, go to https://hackage.haskell.org/package/stack , find the date where this was uploaded to/built on hackage, and put that date in cabal.project:

packages: .

index-state: 2019-07-16T20:16:22Z

then build with the compiler that's mentioned in the build log (in that case, 8.6.3) so you get the exact versions of hardwired packages.

This won't solve the problem "build with ghc-8.8.?" but it solves the bootstrapping problem "build stack from source". Note that the resulting stack executable can be used fine to build stack projects with ghc-8.8.?

[arrowd]

Stack compiles fine with GHC 8.8.3 on FreeBSD. This can be closed, I guess.

[jwaldmann]

Well cabal install with ghc-8.8.3 and current hackage gives

src/Stack/Types/Resolver.hs:71:17: error:
    Ambiguous occurrence ‘SnapName’

for me. This way of building is inherently unreliable. I mean, that's exactly the problem that stack solves.

Still, I think this is the right goal https://hackage.haskell.org/package/stack This package on Hackage is provided for convenience and bootstrapping purposes but it is currently not met.