Help wanted! Win32 and HGL for GHC on Windows

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

Dear GHC users

This is an appeal for help with the 

	libraries/Win32 package [on Windows, obviously]
	libraries/HGL package [on Windows]

Here's the situation:

* Win32 provides access to the native Windows API, which is obviously
   very useful for people writing Haskell on Windows.  HGL, the "Haskell
   Graphics Library", is the graphics package used by Paul Hudak's book
   "The Haskell School of Expression".

* The libraries/Win32 package is supposed to supercede the old hslibs
  win32 package. Ross Paterson ported the latter to become the former,
  but the libraries/Win32 package had not received very much testing,
  and Ross can't do any more himself.  We aren't confident that it's
  reliable.
 
   (Sadly, the two packages have the same name (modulo case) which has
   given rise to much confusion. But that's another matter.)

* The libraries/HGL package works fine on Unix, where it sits on top
  of the libraries/X11 package.  But it does not work properly on
  Windows, where it sits on top of libraries/Win32. It is not clear
  whether the problem is with the HGL package or the Win32 package.


So the current situation is that, for GHC on Windows, the new
hierarchical 
libraries world lacks
	(a) a reliable Win32 package and 
	(b) a HGL package that works at all.  
This is sad, especially as we are trying to nuke hsllibs altogether.


	Question: would anyone be willing to fix the libraries/Win32 
	package; and (better still) look after it thereafter?  
	We'd be delighted to give commit rights to anyone 
	who was willing to do this.  

[So far as we know the two libraries/ packages work ok in Hugs, so
there probably isn't that much to do.]

Many thanks

Simon