Made a release on Friday. But I had to rebuild the OSX and Linux standalone builds today to fix a bug in them.

Spent the past three days redoing the whole Android build environment. I've been progressively moving from my first hacked up Android build env to something more reproducible and sane. Finally I am at the point where I can run a shell script (well, actually, 3 shell scripts) and get an Android build chroot. It's still not immune to breaking when new versions of haskell libs are uploaded, but this is much better, and should be maintainable going forward.

This is a good starting point for getting git-annex into the F-Droid app store, or for trying to build with a newer version of the Android SDK and NDK, to perhaps get it working on Android 4.3. (Eventually. I am so sick of building Android stuff right now..)

Friday was all spent struggling to get ghc-android to build. I had not built it successfully since February. I finally did, on Saturday, and I have made my own fork of it which builds using a known-good snapshot of the current development version of ghc. Building this in a Debian stable chroot means that there should be no possibility that upstream changes will break the build again.

With ghc built, I moved on to building all the haskell libs git-annex needs. Unfortunately my build script for these also has stopped working since I made it in April. I failed to pin every package at a defined version, and things broke.

So, I redid the build script, and updated all the haskell libs to the newest versions while I was at it. I have decided not to pin the library versions (at least until I find a foolproof way to do it), so this new script will break in the future, but it should break in a way I can fix up easily by just refreshing a patch.

The new ghc-android build has a nice feature of at least being able to compile Template Haskell code (though still not run it at compile time. This made the patching needed in the Haskell libs quite a lot less. Offset somewhat by me needing to make general fixes to lots of libs to build with ghc head. Including some fun with ==# changing its type from Bool to Int#. In all, I think I removed around 2.5 thousand lines of patches! (Only 6 thousand lines to go...)

Today I improved ghc-android some more so it cross builds several C libraries that are needed to build several haskell libraries needed for XMPP. I had only ever built those once, and done it by hand, and very hackishly. Now they all build automatically too.

And, I put together a script that builds the debian stable chroot and installs ghc-android.

And, I hacked on the EvilSplicer (which is sadly still needed) to work with the new ghc/yesod/etc.

At this point, I have git-annex successfully building, including the APK!

In a bored hour waiting for a compile, I also sped up git annex add on OSX by I think a factor of 10. Using cryptohash for hash calculation now, when external hash programs are not available. It's still a few percentage points slower than external hash programs, or I'd use it by default.

This period of important drudgery was sponsored by an unknown bitcoin user, and by Bradley Unterrheiner and Andreas Olsson.