Today I took the initiative and created a FreeBSD CI runner on the gitlab.haskell.org platform. What this means is that there is now a path towards official testing and building of GHC on FreeBSD. With enough user contribution and enthusiasm, this could result in a revival of official FreeBSD support for future GHC releases.
My role in this is solely to support anybody who wants to come along and help. That said, I am personally excited about GHC running on as many platforms as possible, so I do hope someone steps up.
If you want to help revive FreeBSD support, please check it out! !2: Draft: Reinstating FreeBSD · Merge requests · Bryan R / GHC · GitLab. Ping me if you need GitLab access.
Backstory:
FreeBSD has been officially unsupported absent from official downloads since around GHC 9.6, due to the drain it placed on GHC maintainers and the perceived lack of user interest. The manner in which this happened has caused friction with GHCup; a regrettable matter.
To support FreeBSD users, the GHC maintainers need someone in the community to provide a FreeBSD CI runner. Acting as the Haskell Foundation DevOps engineer, I am happy to be that someone. The Foundation is paying for the runner. Currently there is just one underpowered machine, but it should be sufficient for the immediate need of (1) standardizing how FreeBSD is initialized for CI and (2) getting tests to pass again.
More details:
I have enabled the runner on my personal GHC fork, as you can see in the link above. That’s because I don’t want to create chaos in the upstream CI with an unstable FreeBSD job. Only once the job has been stabilized would we merge it upstream (and increase FreeBSD CI capacity).
