[Haskell-cafe] When is extra-libraries config in .cabal

[Edward Ing]

I am building and running some haskelldb/HDBC/HSQL libraries on
Windows XP (using the MinGW minimals system (MSYS))  with GHC
environment.

I ran into runtime link problems, foreign functions would not found.
eg. atoi,from C standard; recv from sockets.

To solve the problem, I added dll's to the build configuration field
"extra-libraries", MSVCRT (c runtime), KERNEL32, WSOCK32 (sockets).
This solved the problem.

1. But is there a better way to solve the problem? I am expecting that
those libraries are available through the OS and do not need explicit
loading. I am confuse by what does the loading of the libraries.

2. Does a UNIX/POSIX system not have this problem?

Information for understanding this problem would be great.
Edward Ing