This directory contains things needed to successfully unpack the GHC binary distribution. To build GHC from source, GHC is needed. The source tarball (and the test suite that goes with it) are included, as well as a SLKBUILD.src that doesn't work even if the bindist is installed. The only way I could get it to build (apparently with entire success) was to first unpack the bindist again and configure the source build to use --with-ghc that unpacked ghc. But only if the same ghc was *also* installed on the system. At that point, I gave up, and reverted to packaging the bindist.

My suspicion (the next avenue to pursue) is it's something to do with where GHC is looking for its dependent pieces such as internal libraries; maybe some of these are expected to be at their normal places, and not the corresponding path relative to the unpacked version. 

One way to test this hypothesis would be to allow both the bindist version and the source version to put their stuff in its default places - that is, reduce the number of options passed to ./configure, and see if it then worked. In that case, it might be a short path to working out the right patch to solve the whole thing.

These builds take an inordinate amount of time and life is short.