[Haskell-cafe] Building Haskell stuff on Windows

[Andrew Coppin]

Thomas Schilling wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-11-08 at 18:34 +0000, Andrew Coppin wrote:
>   
>> Neil Mitchell wrote:
>>     
>>> Windows and Haskell is not a well travelled route, but if you stray of
>>> the cuddly installer packages, it gets even worse.
>>>   
>>>       
>> Is that why Cabal packages never ever install on Windows?
>>     
>
> Could you be more specific what your problems are?
>   

Not to the point that anybody is likely to be able to help me...

According to the instructions, if I'm understanding this correctly, 
you're supposed to be able to unpack a package, and do

  runhaskell Setup configure
  runhaskell Setup make
  runhaskell Setup install

However, having so far tried this with not less than 3 different 
packages downloaded from Hackage, not one single one has ever worked. I 
suppose it's possible that I just happened to pick 3 packages that all 
have something wrong with them and normally it would work just fine... 
but all I've ever seen it do it fail.

I tried to install HaXmL. It seemed to install, yet GHC insisted it 
wasn't installed.

I can't remember what the second thing was, sorry.

I tried to install the SDL binding; it choked because it can't find 
"sh". (Which, no, you won't. It's Windows. We don't have anything that 
advanced yet.) In that case, I believe there are some additional 
Windows-specific instructions, which I haven't got round to wading 
through just yet. (Something about fiddling with some of the 
configuration files manually before starting. I thought that's what 
Cabal itself was supposed to do, but anyway.)


OK, so I'm being a little over-harsh here. In the 3rd case, there are 
some extra instructions that are supposed to make it work - and who 
knows, maybe when I go try them SDL will work perfectly. But so far, 0 
out of 3 isn't very impressive. I had assumed that I'm just doing 
something wrong, or it isn't documented very well or something. But now 
I'm just wondering if it hasn't been tested on Windows very much...

I realise it's much easier to sit here and criticise than to actually do 
something about fixing the problem. Clearly Cabal must work for 
somebody, so I was just wondering if my Cabal problems are because I'm 
on Windows, that's all.

(For what it's worth, I actually managed to build Gtk2hs from source 
under Linux - and I've never built anything on Linux before! It was 
really quite simple though. I mean, took about 2 hours to think about 
it, but it's a very old laptop...)