GHC MinGW distribution

[Robin KAY]

Dear All,

I wanted to enquire about the prospects for updating the version of 
MinGW which ships with the Windows binary distribution of GHC. The 
version included as of 7.8.2 is now several years old and in some cases 
I've found that it's incompatible with the libraries produced by newer 
versions of MinGW (as to be expected, per my understanding).

Specifically, my HsQML binding for Qt can't be used with the libraries 
from the official Windows binary distribution of Qt 5 because the 
resulting executables crash on start-up with runtime incompatibilities. 
I'm in the process of trying to build out-of-the-box compatible Qt 
binaries against GHC's MinGW, but Qt's stated minimum requirements on 
the tool-chain version aren't encouraging. The only way I currently have 
of making this work is for users to edit their GHC settings file to 
point GHC at a version of gcc.exe from a newer MinGW (such as the one 
which ships with Qt). The fact that this seems to work is encouraging, 
but it's still a bit of a difficult process to put people through.

I know that Windows developers are in short supply, so I would like to 
offer what assistance I can in making this happen. There appear to be 
copies of MinGW stored in the GHC repository at 
http://git.haskell.org/ghc-tarballs.git/tree . Does the build system use 
these automatically or are they just there for reference?

Thanks,

-- 
Robin KAY