Cabal + WinHugs + Windows + No C Compiler

[Duncan Coutts]

On Tue, 2006-11-07 at 21:10 +0000, Neil Mitchell wrote:
> Hi
> 
> > Well I guess that's just the issue. Cabal also isn't an existing
> > dependency. It'd be pretty bad to make every library & program depend on
> > Cabal. Perhaps it's just as bad to make it depend on Win32, but I think
> > it's probably less bad. Or it could go in base or we could leave it as
> > is as an FFI import.
> 
> The options:
> 
> * Depend on win32 - plenty of users won't have this installed (since
> its no longer bundled by default)

It's not? Ok, I'm a bit surprised.

> * Depend on FFI - most WinHugs users won't have C installed

So WinHugs isn't going to support the FFI spec? It's not clear that you
need a C compiler to support the FFI. Python and GHC can compile without
a C compiler and still do FFI.

> * Depend on Cabal - everyone with WinHugs or GHC will definitely have
> this installed.
> 
> * Depend on base - everyone everywhere will have this installed, but
> requires changing base and there is no equivalent function on Posix
> (otherwise this would be a useful general purpose function)
> 
> My vote goes in the direction of Cabal or base, since if its not one
> of those two I probably just won't bother using the Path functionality
> for Hoogle.

But you see that it means that every package built with Cabal must then
depend on Cabal? ie it'd have to go in build-depends for every single
package! This would be very bad. What's more, it would mean that people
would not do it on unix and it'd work, but then fail on windows because
only on windows would the Paths_<pkg> module need Cabal. Actually that
also applies to using the Win32 package or any non-base package.

It's not something that people would really like to put into base
because it's not portable. There really is no equivalent to
GetModuleFileName in Unix (indeed deliberately so because you can delete
the binary while the program is still running).

I don't see a good solution apart from the current FFI solution.

Duncan