This repository contains the libraries that ghcjs-boot builds and a few additional files that are used in the boot process. A snapshot of this repository is included with a release distribution of GHCJS (in lib/cache/boot.tar).

ghcjs-boot --dev clones this repository in the GHCJS library directory. The default location is something like ~/.ghcjs/x86_64-darwin-0.1.0-7.8.3/ghcjs/ghcjs-boot, but you can change the library directory by editing the GHCJS wrapper script (change the -B argument).

The runtime system is not included in this repository, it's in the shims repo (also cloned by ghcjs-boot, default location similar to ~/.ghcjs/x86_64-darwin-0.1.0-7.8.3/ghcjs/shims).

ghcjs-boot does not try to update an existing ghcjs-boot repository, use ghcjs-boot --dev --clean to start from scratch. This completely removes any existing version.

All libraries are included as git submodules. Most of them directly refer to the upstream repository, since maintaining our own fork is rather heavyweight and most packages can be used unchanged or almost unchanged.

ghcjs-boot applies the patches under /patches after initializing the submodules when the repository is first cloned. After that, you're on your own, ghcjs-boot does not try to re-apply updated patches.

to update a patched submodule:

$ git reset --hard
$ git checkout branch
$ git pull
$ patch -p1 < ../../patches/package.patch

now fix any issues with the patch. to quickly get a new patch without
making a commit, add all untracked files using `git add -N`, and then:

$ git diff > ../../patches/package.patch

and add the changes to the commit (from the root of the repository):

$ git add patches/package.patch
$ git add boot/package

run cabal sdist in the ghcjs repository, this runs the utils/update_archives.sh script that clones the ghcjs-boot repository to build the lib/cache/boot.tar file. It also builds lib/cache/shims.tar (from the shims repository) and lib/cache/test.tar (from the test subdirectory).

Verify that a fresh release boot (ghcjs-boot --clean, without --dev) finishes without errors and that all tests in the test suite pass. Install the standalone ghcjs-testsuite package from the test subdirectory to easily validate the release: ghcjs-testsuite automatically runs the tests from the library directory of a GHCJS release build.