no darcs and no VERSION file

[zooko]

Trying to port ghc to OpenBSD/sparc64 so that I can build darcs there so that I can use darcs, I got this tarball:

 http://darcs.haskell.org/ghc-HEAD-2009-05-16-ghc-corelibs-testsuite.tar.bz2

And then started following the instructions on  http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Building/Porting . The ./configure --enable-hc-boot step failed with:

configure: error: failed to detect version date: check that darcs is in your path

find . -name '*VERSION*' turned up no hits, so I guess that the VERSION file is being accidentally omitted from the tarball.

[zooko]

I created a VERSION file and that got past this problem to another problem, saying "no $ver_date, check that darcs is installed". I guess the tarball should have a VERSION file added.

I got past this problem by the following extra step before ./configure:

/bin/rm -rf ./_darcs

I suggest that the configure script try running "darcs" and then if it fails move on without a ver_date instead of testing for the existence of _darcs and then trying to run darcs and then failing hard if it doesn't get a ver_date.

[igloo]

I believe that zooko is unstuck now that source dists are working again.

I think it's reasonable that darcs checkouts can assume that darcs exists, so I'll close this ticket.