[Haskell-cafe] Building Haskell stuff on Windows

[Andrew Coppin]

Duncan Coutts wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-11-08 at 22:04 +0000, Andrew Coppin wrote:
>
>   
>> 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
>>     
>
> Yep, that's the procedure. Though as I keep telling everyone we're
> trying to replace that with just:
>
> cabal install blah
>
> I tested this on Windows the other day, it's nearly working, just a
> couple bugs to go.
>   

Mmm, OK.

>
>> I tried to install HaXmL. It seemed to install, yet GHC insisted it 
>> wasn't installed.
>>     
>
> Now that one I would expect to work under windows since it's pure
> Haskell code.
>   

As far as I can tell, it seemed to *compile* OK. It just wouldn't *work* 
once installed. GHC insisted that no such package exists... 
(Registration bug?) This was a while ago I guess.

>> But now 
>> I'm just wondering if it hasn't been tested on Windows very much...
>>     
>
> That's a big part of the problem. Most developers cannot or do not test
> under windows. This should not be a problem for pure Haskell modules but
> for anything that binds to C libraries it's a major problem. Under unix
> we can usually assume that the C library and it's header files are
> installed in a standard location. Under windows that's never true.
>
> Then as you noted, some packages use configure scripts which use sh.
> That'll never fly on a standard windows install. Hopefully over time we
> can replace those scripts with some better solution using Cabal.
>   

Can somebody explain to me, in simple words, what "Cabal" is actually 
supposed to do?

I mean, when I write Haskell code, I just give people the source code, 
they compile it, it works. What is this Cabal thing supposed to be 
achieving?

>> 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.
>>     
>
> So the ones I would expect to work out of the box on Windows are the
> packages on hackage that use "build-type: Simple" and do not use
> "extensions: ForeignFunctionInterface".
>
> Apart from that, it's going to be hit and miss until we work out a
> better system for reporting what works and what doesn't from hackage on
> different platforms.
>
> Some packages that use FFI work fine, like Cabal itself, or the zlib,
> bzlib packages. But those were specifically tested on Windows.
>   

Yeah, sounds like there just needs to be some way to annotate entries to 
say how testing a thing is, where it's been tested, etc. Doesn't sound 
too hard. [For the person who doesn't have to write it anyway... ;-) ]

>> (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...)
>>     
>
> :-)
>
> (btw the Gtk2Hs INSTALL file describes how to configure for a quicker
> build)
>   

I didn't read any documentation. Just downloaded a tarball, spent 20 
minutes reading the man page to figure out how to untar it [can you tell 
I'm a Unix expert?], and then run three "make" commands. The configure 
state complained about a whole bunch of things (e.g., GTK+ isn't 
installed... doh!), and then it all worked OK. It did take a vast amount 
of time to build though; nailed my poor little Mobile Athlon 1700 to the 
wall...