Configure: gcc problem under mingw/i386

[Niculae Ionita]

Hi all,

I'm new to GHC Dev and I'm trying to build GHC 7.7 (the repo is about 9 
days old) on a Windows machine with mingw32. I followed the very helpful 
article for newcomers to GHC dev ( 
http://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Newcomers# ) and up to configure it 
was easy.

Now I get a problem with configure, the last few output lines are:

GHC build  : i386-unknown-mingw32
GHC host   : i386-unknown-mingw32
GHC target : i386-unknown-mingw32
configure: Building in-tree ghc-pwd
checking for path to top of build tree... j:/ghc
checking for gcc... j:/ghc/inplace/mingw/bin/gcc.exe
checking whether the C compiler works... no
configure: error: in `/j/ghc':
configure: error: C compiler cannot create executables
See `config.log' for more details

 From config.log it's clear that j:/ghc/inplace/mingw/bin/gcc.exe is 
missing (actually already the bin is missing). My gcc is in /mingw/bin, 
which is in PATH, but even if I try with the option

--with-gcc=/mingw/bin/gcc

I get the same error.

So I was looking in the configure script and found out that, for mingw32 
and i386, gcc must be under $hardtop/inplace/mingw/bin/, and if not, 
there are commands to unpack all tools from tar files like 
ghc-tarballs/mingw/binutils*.tar.lzma and a few others.

The point is, I don't have the subdirectory ghc-tarballs under my ghc 
directory.

Now, my questions:

1. Are there any reasons to not use the building tools coming from the 
mingw installation, and use the dedicated ones?

2. Where could I find those tarballs? Did I miss something when updated 
the repositories?

Thanks,
Nicu